Modems have been around for a very long time. By the time the mid-80's rolled around, a 300-baud cuff modem was well within the range of a young kid who had some paper-route money, because that's what I did. And my family was not wealthy at all.
[edit]- I found an article from 1987 talking about how amazingly fast (and cheap) the new 2400 baud modems were. I had to chuckle, as I still remember going from 300 (slow enough that your reading speed was baud-limited) to 1200 (wow! I can barely keep up!) 2400 and above was a speed that seemed almost decadent.
Oh, yeah, if local calls weren't free, BBS's would have never taken off the way they did. It was a thrill being part of a network where each BBS would make a nightly call to the furthest still-local BBS, which would then repeat the process... You could reach all the way across the country and back in a few days, for free! It felt like you were getting away with something. Exciting times.
Not all parents were OK with blocking the phone line with a modem when they have just watched a movie were a curious teenager almost started WW III by accidentally hacking into the Pentagon (speaking from experience).
I thought it was so cool to have an acoustic-coupler modem like Broderick's character in War Games. Never did find the number to connect to the WOPR, though.
In the mid-80s, only maybe 10% of U.S. households had a computer, much less a modem. You also paid by-the-minute long-distance charges for calling anyone (or any computer) outside your town.
That's why local BBSes that were part of a relay network were so popular. Communicating with folks far outside one's home range 'for free' was exciting!
I think what changed is less access to consumption, but access to making your own. When you wanted to host your own community, you need a domain and a server and some technical skills. That was a much higher bar than you need to create a Facebook community. That's ultimately what made the internet boring. Every special interest group used to have their own hand created websites that were a labor of passion. Now it's just another Facebook group or sub Reddit.
That's part of it, no doubt. I got started in the BBS era, pre-WWW, and the folks that set up their own bulletin boards were all interesting in their own right. Each board, even if it used the same base software as another, had its own distinct personality and flavor.
Access to a modem, a piece of hardware that cost hundreds of dollars, and obviously also required a machine that cost thousands. Unless you attended a university, which was also more exclusive in the early 80s than now.
Things changed very rapidly back then. By the time I was old enough to be part of BBS culture (mid-80's), a Commodore was a couple hundred dollars, and a modem not even $100. Penetration by % of population was low compared to today's ubiquity, but competent machines were readily affordable to the majority of Americans.
