@MegaMichelle

Weirdly, they had something very similar called BBSes, which were a lot like Fediverse servers and mostly run by volunteers. You would phone up a BBS on your computer's modem, and it would let you post messages and download files. The different BBSes would also exchange messages, so that people on different BBSes could stay in touch.

For anyone reading this and interested in this topic, there's a documentary series about them on PeerTube at:

fedi.video/w/p/h6CMyFnbdPZXpaR