Submission + - How 1980s hackers used bulletin boards to learn about heavy metal (furious.com)
"Most of the people in my peer group would be calling bulletin boards daily and were phone phreaks, so their long-distance calls were free. It was basically like being a regular on 4chan or Reddit, but thirty years ago. So we would talk about niche topics like metal that were very hard to find out about unless you, say, lived in a big city or college town and knew the right people/right places to go," said Grandmaster Ratte, a member of the Cult of the Dead Cow well-regarded in hacker circles. "Instead, you had access to people from all over the world, many of whom were very knowledgeable. I learned about tons of interesting subcultures via BBSs that I never would have known about until the Internet came along," he added.