You mentioned BBS so I was throwing out some stuff I used to do.
2002 .. Big LOL! .. try 1980's.. telnet c64 ( dial up boards ),bbs ,later distro's ( amiga ) etc .. and .. At&t
In 1980 I was running Radio Free Venice BBS on an ATARI with 2 banks of 64K inside it and a home made circut board on the outside with a full megabyte of Ram,four 5 1/4" floppies with custom chips,a homemade interface that let me run a 40MB IBM HD (cost $460 for that thing!).
I had probably the first on-line game running on it...RoboWars.
I even played F15 on it over 2 meter ham radio!
I could boot C64 or IBM OS from floppy and run their programs as well...Lotus 123 took up 6 floppies.