I was 12 years old when I started using BBSs (in 1989). I missed the heyday of 1980s BBSing. I lived in rural Ohio and had a highly-restricted local calling area. I did call some far-flung BBSs outside my locality, running up some (for the time) pretty hefty long distance bills.

1 - When I started I'd call every couple of days. By the time I got into high school (the twilight of local BBSing in my area as dial-up ISPs moved-in) I was calling boards every day. We had a reasonably lively BBS community (for the population) and had real-life meetups, too. Missing a day sometimes meant missing a lot. I know of at least one married couple that met on the boards in their late teens. It was a pretty neat scene.

I used a lot of "Procomm Plus", but "Telix" and "Qmodem" were popular on the PC platform, too.

"Offline reader" software was really, really helpful. This was software that let you download a "packet" of message boards and email, read and reply offline, then upload your responses. (I was of the "Silly Little Mail Reader" religion.)

Once I got Windows 3.1 and could multitask I'd dial-in to a board, download an email "packet", then queue up and file downloads or uploads while I read messages, and maybe even got my reply upload prepared.

2 - The guy who sold me my first (used) modem gave me a couple local board numbers. BBS ads and lists downloaded from boards gave me a few. Word-of-mouth was how I got into the "underground" BBS scene.

3 - Locally there were just small single-line boards. Because some boards straddled two local calling areas they were more popular, but none of them were big. I recall a 40 user board being large. I called some Cleveland, OH-area boards, and there were definitely some bigger multi-line systems there with hundreds of users.

4 - Politics, humor, local issues, computers and tech, gaming, hacking, and "in joke" local board culture stuff are the things I remember. I stayed out of the political stuff, for the most part.

5 - Personal computing software and hardware were the main technical topics on most boards. There was a local board that had a fair amount of amateur radio discussion, too. I don't remember a lot of local BBS programming discussion. There were forums in the big online services (CompuServ, Prodigy, GEnie, etc) where programming was more seriously discussed. On the "underground" side cracking copy protection, hacking, phone phreaking, and virus writing were the more technical discussions (and, of course, there was the trash talking).

Some companies would put up a board to support their own software and, obviously, that dominated the discussion there.

For "single-line" ones did you have to stay connected to the server while browsing?

Or would your PC just download a local copy?