Here is a neat set of videos ilustrating how the BBS system worked. People were excited by the possibility of "one day" everyone could be meeting online. If you would say something like that in the 80's, you wouldn't get many friends. Now it looks like the way you MEET your FRIENDS and guess what... they are not nerds. Today we have Internet users...
Our kids don't even know of a world without Internet, but BBS played a very important role on terraforming the future: