There weren't that many people online, but because there were so few BBSes/lines it could be difficult to get connected. Once connected there wasn't all that much to do, send and check messages, look at mostly utility programs like file compression, and serial terminal, maybe a few dithered GIF images, bit rates were so low 2400 for a very long time that larger programs/files weren't really shared. Demo versions of full shareware was popular. I remember finding Composer 669 music tracker thinking it was the coolest thing ever and learning how to send a money order to the author in the mail.

Quite some time later also ran an OS/2 BBS for a while that I started with a younger highschooler. By then there were lots more BBSes and online services but not much for OS/2 so that made sense. I recall getting an amazing discount on a US Robotics Courier modem (the large flat black one, Dual Standard I think it was) it was so much faster. At that time I also had a job and the office used Telebit Trailblazer modems that had a fast proprietary protocol for communication between offices. I once did tech support from Toronto to Vancouver to recover corrupted OS/2 drives at an IBM office, I sent Norton Utility over the modem and a series of things to enter at the DOS prompt to reconstruct/undelete the OS/2 HPFS filesystem. This part doesn't have much to do with BBSes but that's what it was like around those times. Laplink was another super popular file transfer utility that could directly connect two computers using a printer/parallel, serial cable, or remotely via modem. BBSes were possibly how I also found the VESA VGA driver for OS/2 1.3 that a summer student had made at an IBM office--it was incredible being able to run high-res (800x600 or 1024x768) graphics on a PC clone and ATI VGA card (overclocked 11 MHz ISA bus) running OS/2.