Ok I have been sitting on this post for quite some time. I promised in the last installment of the Rysztory of the Commodore 64 I would discuss modems and describe what a BBS was.
A BBS stands for Bulletin Board System and was one of the ways people communicated by computer before the World Wide Web. There already was the internet but unless you were using online services such as Compuserve or Delphi you had no way of getting to it. Even if you could get access to the Internet the services available weren't that exciting at the time. A bulletin board was basically a computer left on all the time running special software  connected to a phone line with a piece of hardware called a modem.  Computers talk a digital language and your normal telephone line is analog. For two computers to communicate across a telephone line the data had to be converted from digital to analog and back again. And to do that each computer had to have a modem. To call another computer you ran a program that could dial the telephone number of the computer you wished to connect to. Most BBS's only had one phone line so only one person could connect at a time. Some systems had multiple modems and telephone lines to allow simultaneous users to connect. Of course you had to pay for each of those phone lines which can be quite expensive. Anyway, a BBS had message boards, downloads, games and other fun things to do. Many of the same things we now do on the World Wide Web you could do on a BBS, just much slower! To download a little game for your Commodore 64 could take hours depending on how fast your modem was. There were BBS's all over Connecticut and I even ran one for a time. I had a Commodore 64 with a 512K ram expander, 2 1541 Disk drives, a 1571 drive and 2-3 1581 disk drives. Even the smallest iPhone has more space than my whole system had. The software was called Color 64 and it was mostly written in BASIC which allowed great flexibility in customizing the software.  I would wake up sometimes in the middle of the night because the drives were whirring away and the lights were all flashing as people one by one dialed into my system.