In Febuary of 1978 the first public BBS went on-line in Chicago,IL. Anyone remember...
http://gunsmoke.me/test/retro/koala.jpg

With the advent of the 'SmartModem' (anyone remember the Hayes modems?) the BBS became hugely popular until the mid 1990's. But the internet actually became public around 1982. Of course, it started much earlier but was limited to military use. We went from using common bulletin boards run by sysops (System Operators) over public phone lines to creating our very own websites connected via telnet. Then the revolution began. Today almost anyone can have a website, created in as little as a few minutes. Graphics, sound, videos and more. Wow! Now everything is going 'responsive'. Smart phones, tablets and huge PC monitors make no difference to these awesome websites! Have we gone to far? Maybe. I am now working on my next website. What do you think . . . http://gunsmoke.me/test/retro

PS. Can you tell I'm really really drugged up tonight?

Remember the Hayes I'm in it half the time.

Here -Here. I feel like Spicoli from Fast Times at Ridgemont High when they all pile out of the mini-van in a fog of weed...wait a minute...that's legal now!

Not legal here yet although my daughter wishes lol

I ran a BBS on a Commodore 64 and then on a Commodore 128 had three floppy drives (and for a while on an Amiga), two 1581 and one 1541 disk drives with a cassette tape drive for backup and a 300 bps modem!!! And then when 1200 bps modems came out, talk about FAST!! The BBS software was called Color64, it was AWESOME!!!

Yep, I remember the first modem I used was with the telephone handset.
My first computer was an OSI, programmable only in machine language, and with a cassette to save/load programs.

http://www.dougsartgallery.com/images/ASCII-happy-face-2.gif

I remember getting a 14.4 modem for my birthday and it over $150 at the time (wow). When I connected to my favorite bbs which I used a lower modem with before, I was so excited to download a midi file in under 5 minutes.

I try to explain BBS's to my kids and they just don't get it.

My first mdem was a 920bps one for dial-up, and I was one of the first (in 1993) in my area to have internet. Colleagues and neighbours came to my house to see what it was all about, and my phone bill went up about 300%, so I had to charge them for the time they were on.
I had a win 3.1 pc at that time, with a 280MB HDD and 4MB ram.

The modem is quite an old device, think it actually goes back to the 1940s I bet that was quicker than the net speeds my provider gives

Oh, you know, without all the adverts and spam mails clogging up the bandwidth, it might well have been faster.