Enter the BBS From the late 1970s through the 1990s, the bulletin-board system became a grassroots communications platform. Hosted on personal computers and accessed via dial-up modems, BBSes were local, text-driven forums where users could post messages, swap files, and leave classifieds. They came in many flavors—hobbyist, political, underground—and many cities had at least one “scene” BBS serving visual artists, musicians, and photographers.