Before the internet we spent a LOT of time on BBSs!<p>And we generally had (sometimes indirect) access to the internet -- Usenet, uucp, email -- through some combination of Fidonet, WWIVnet, and somebody running an open-access Unix box.<p>And on those BBS systems there were door games as well as discussion boards, file download areas, etc.<p>The internet existed then too -- it&#x27;s just that the national science foundation didn&#x27;t allow what they called commercial traffic on it at the time.  It was a wonderful resource for people learning to write software (comp.lang.lisp, comp.lang.c) or who wanted to screw off (talk.bizarre).<p>And around that time &#x27;85 or &#x27;86, I had a PC Pursuit account that allowed me to hop all over the country to get to BBSs in other cities that weren&#x27;t on one of the store-and-forward networks.<p>There was plenty for the average person to do with a 1985 computer -- provided they had a modem, telix, and kermit, xmodem or zmodem -- and an agreement with everybody in the house to check before picking up the telephone handset.