Before the World Wide Web, and long before social networks, on the Internet there were the BBS: the Bullettin Board System. The first went online on February 16, 1978. At that time Apple and Microsoft were two tiny startups led by a couple in their twenties, computers had just started to become personal and to connect to the Net you had to use the telephone line, waiting an infinite time.
In the United States in late January there was a legendary snowfall, The Great Blizzard, which paralyzed the Midwest for days. Two in their thirties, Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, who were part of a geek club nicely called Cache (the acronym stands for Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists Exchange), they were closed at home like everyone else and so they began to study how to bring the bulletin boards that were in offices and universities to the Net, through which people exchanged messages. The Bulletin Boards, in fact.
As mentioned, the first BBS went online on February 16, but the two they broke the news in a specialized magazine, Byte, only in November (title: “Hobbyist Computerized Bulletin Board”), creating a lot of excitement so much that, Wired will say, by the mid-80s the BBS community had grown a lot. There were so many, each with its own specialty of topics covered, yet it was a small world of enthusiasts to the point of challenging the technological complexities and grueling lengths of those first connections.
Basically it was the world of social media before social media: you could post something, download software or play the very first video games. The World Wide Web, at the beginning of the 90s, closed the era of the BBS, which however survives in the memory of the very first inhabitants of the Net. Every now and then you will hear them exclaim that “I was in the first BBS, what do you know? young people? ”If you are curious, on the Net you can find a documentary.