Before the web was a thing, Bulletin Board Systems—BBS for short—were where the action happened. Starting in the late ’70s and exploding through the ’80s and early ’90s, BBSes were basically online hangouts you dialed into with a modem, one user at a time, on your beige PC. You’d log in, post messages, trade files, and play text-based games—legendary stuff like TradeWars 2002. FidoNet showed up in 1984, linking BBSes together so users could actually communicate across the country, which was mind-blowing back then. By the time high-speed modems hit in the mid-’90s, the internet and AOL were taking over, and BBSes slowly faded out. But if you were there, the sound of that modem handshake still hits different.