In "Country Boy, City Girl" I have been talking about a lot of ideas and concepts that predate what people know and are familiar with today. Much is very archaic, and incredibly obsolete. But this is also being done to keep the story based firmly in the era it is being written in.
The BBS was a huge precursor to "The Internet" being available to the masses. At this time, if you had a modem (if you even had one, almost nobody did), you were limited to a service like CompuServe, The Source, or America On-Line, which actually charged you from around $2-25 per hour to use their services. Or you used Prodigy, which was more flat rate, but tons and tons of ads and limitations.
So most of us called a local Bulletin Board System (BBS). That would be a person like me, who put a phone in their house onto a computer, so other people could call it. We would have local chat rooms (the "Bulletin Board" part), download files like the Castle Wolfenstein demo, or text files, images scanned from Playboy, MIDI files, and things like this. Almost all a few hundred K in size, because storage was incredibly expensive.
They also had "door games", where you could basically play a few games which were turn based and others could participate in. Not really "real time", but it was getting there.
If the BBS was really advanced, they might install a FOSSIL driver, and use an ECHO service like FIDONet. A BBS would host a bunch of groups on various topics, and a couple of times a day we would call out to our main node and download a packet of updates, s well as the messages from our system going out. They then would repeat this process to the next higher step. It would take 2-5 days foe a message posted to be available across the entire network, and to get a response.
But hell, in this era 5 days of message lag was just accepted, it was faster than using the mail.
I posted a story that I first saw on a local BBS in around 1990. I even hosted it on my own BBS, but many here are trying to dig through places like ASSTR to locate the "author". Well, you will not find it there, I saw it before the ASS or ASSM Usenet groups even existed. So all that could be found is some other schmuck that just posted it there years later and did not write it themselves.
It really is from a time before The Internet existed. And it is obvious that many simply can not comprehend of people exchanging files before such a time.