bulletin boards (BBSs),
Illegal then in many countries, at least in Europe. And that made the equipment to run a BBS or to access one rather expensive. I remember the times well. Many European countries had monopoly government agencies, for running postal, telegraph and telephone service, aka the PTTs.
Using the sacred telephone network for data transfer? This scared the shit out of the bureaucrats at the PTTs. The network was for telephony, dammit. And you were asked to only make phone calls for serious things, and keep the calls short. Date transfer? Run for the hills!
Modems, even the acoustic couplers, need to be certified by the PTTs. It was impossible for an individual to buy a legal modem. Even companies couldn't buy a modem. Modems had to be rented from the PTTs, and as a company you could only rent one if you had a legitimate reason. I.e. if they had vetted you that you had a real, extremely important reason. You were also required to put the uplink side (the board) on a separate telephone line, and the PTTs claimed they connected such line in the CO in a way it would not interfere with phone service. At times when it was still hard for a normal household to get a normal telephone line, and some households had to share a line, it was impossible to get a special, second dedicated line for a BBS.
At one point certified acoustic couplers appeared, which an individual could indeed buy. For what amounted to the equivalent of something like $1000 then. You can't run a serious BBS with an acoustic coupler. And it is a PITA to use one even if you are just a BBS user.
If you wanted to run a BBS you had to illegally import, or illegally buy, and illegally posses, illegally connect, and illegally operate a non-certified modem. All acts were individually punishable. Already importing a non-certified modem or just having one was an offense. So was trading them. And don't ask about the cost for such illegal modems. And if you were serious about running the BBS 24/7 you had to obtain a normal second telephone line under some pretense and illegally repurpose it for data transfer. We where lightyears away from the friendly neighborhood BBS' I have been told existed in the US.
Running a BBS was often more about the act of running one at all, not about providing particular material to the public.
A bit later certified modems appeared which were almost affordable. The big problem was speed. 300 Baud was the standard. 600 Baud was fast. 1200 Baud was super-high end, and extremely expensive. I am not sure if it 1200 Baud or already 2400 Baud was the highest speed that qualified for certification. So back to illegal modems.
At the beginning of the 90th illegal modems were a mass phenomena and started to become cheap. BBS operators and then also BBS users were typically using illegal modems. Authorities hardly cared any more. Although the last raid of BBS systems for illegal modems I know of was around 1992 or 1993.
Then the market was swamped with legal, certified and rather cheap modems. Most of them even worked
. ISPs serving individuals started to appear in the second half of the 90th, and these cheap modems were used in the early days of the Internet by individuals to hop onto the Information
Superhighway Dirt Track. Which meant, whatever BBS were dying. Some continued on the Internet, some even morphed into an ISP, but it was basically over.