Magazines published lists of phone numbers of bbses you could call with your modem. Long distance calls were very expensive so you could only call those within your local area. Prices were significantly cheaper during evenings and nights so that's when I called. BBSes were mostly for warez, porn, messages, and games. It took forever to download. Settlers I think came on 12 floppies and it took days to download due to quotas. Porn were jpegs or gifs, often magazine scans that loaded top to bottom. You needed way more patience than I had... Turn-based bbs games were quite fun because you played them over several weeks or months. Especially those that synchronized with neighbor bbses so you could team up with local users on a bbs to fight rival bbses.

Amiga bbs were 3l373 and PC bbses were for n00bs. However, Amiga bbses were all ASCII while PC bbses had way better ANSI graphics.

My bbs alias was "interrupt". I had no idea what it meant but I thought interrupt handlers were cool (they are!).

Someone wrote there wasn't politics but as I recall there was lots of bickering and quibbling. Things like "X banned me from his bbs for Y. He is a turd! Spread the message." Some people registered under others names and acted as pricks. I used the "sysop assistance" paging feature to wake up sysops in the middle of the night. Got me banned from more than a few bbses. :p