The dial-up access to the BBSes must have severely crippled the conversations, though, back in the '80s...
Nah, not really. Even pre-picture sub-56k internet was really damn good at facilitating discussion; it just doesn't take much bandwidth at all to transmit raw text, and the whole way-text-based-discussion-works is easily more solid than just about any other format we have for large(ish) scale discussion.
Oh, I used 14.4k (if not 9.6k?) connection to my ISP for my original Usenet sychronisation. But I was really thinking more back to Fidonet days (which I didn't participate in, not unless I touched upon such a resource through an X.25 gateway or similar, when I was still trying to work out my Kermit from my ZMODEM...), where much of the limitation was down to the overhead connection costs of the central core infrastructure over POTS, even if the end-users mananged their own financial costs of dial-in.
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Topic: AmeriPol thread (Read 4473779 times)