It's not just a matter of age, but of location. I am old enough to have grown with 8 bit computers, but at that time, I didn't live in a country with free local calls. The price of local calls was 0.50c a minute in current US dollars. As you might imagine, it's difficult to have a BBS culture with those prices. BBS use was going to have to be attached to some phreaking activities, and at that point, you might as well go international instead of calling down the street.
Countries with that kind of local pricing jumped straight to the internet, at whichever time the prices for the general public became reasonable. For instance, In my home country the first special data rates started in 1995, where a dollar would get you an hour of internet, everything included. With that 30x drop in prices, internet usage exploded.
Here’s a good video (I checked several; this one seems best) with demonstrations and explanations of how it used to work, and how it works now https://youtu.be/JWdr4zeE3JU
> Bulletin board system
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulletin_board_system
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