E.G.

When I was in high school, I was a BBSer.  Here’s a description of the origin of BBSing:

With the advent of the home computer in the 1970’s there arose a hobby known as BBSing. This was the beginning of a great electronic community which met and exchanged ideas over what today is called cyberspace. Before the internet became accessible to the common person, computer bulletin boards were connecting large amounts of people to others in their local community. BBSes (as they are nicknamed) operate by allowing people to connect to another person’s home computer via the local telephone lines. Since this was usually a local phone call, it was as free as calling your neighbor up to chat about the weather. Most early computer bulletin boards were run
as free public hobbyist systems and they operated on great state of the art BBS softwares like C64, Fido, Opus, Seadog, GBBS and MTABBS. The C64 ran on Commodore 64 machines, MTABBS ran on TRS-80’s, GBBS ran on Apple machines and Fido, Opus and Seadog ran on the early IBM 8088’s.
(From this article by a person called Fire Escape.)

By the time I entered the world of BBSes, Commodore 64s were long gone; I BBSed on a 386SX with a 2400 baud modem, and most of the BBSes I called used software called WWIV, which I think most people pronounced as "wiv."

Fire Escape, as you’ll see if you follow the link, goes a little overboard in her nostaligic reconstruction of the lost world of BBSes.  But I think that there was something neat about BBSing which I have not seen recaptured in the various modes of communication I’ve found on the internet.  I remember BBSes as spontaneous, disposable, personality-oriented streams of consciousness: Topics changed rapidly, but each "sub" repesented a months- or years-long conversation among the same cast of characters.  I think in this way BBSes resembled Golden Age comic books, which were written, consumed and then discarded in rapid succession — even though over the years a continuous narrative emerged.