[danjayh]

It wasn't through the Internet. We had a dedicated phone line for it (quite an expense for a 5th grader). Others dialed in directly, and when one user was connected, anyone else trying to connect got a busy signal. If the user wasn't remote, they paid long-distance charges by the minute to the telco. Larger BBSs had banks of phone lines to enable multiple users to connect simultaneously. Just the concept of multiplexing a single physical connection between multiple applications (or even users) via SLIP or PPP and TCP/IP was a pretty revolutionary change that came with the move from terminal-based communication to binary communication.

EDIT: I guess I should have said 'from circuit-switched networking to packet-switched networking', but ... you get the idea. The change largely occurred simultaneously.