The IBM PC takes us to 1981, with a host of both Mac and PCs being used throughout the 1980s. Multiple modems, followed by specialized telco hardware allowed multiple to many users online simultaneously. Compuserve and AOL were two of the largest BBS companies and were the first to migrate to the Internet in the 1990s. Between the middle 1980s to the middle 1990s, BBSes numbered in the tens of thousands in North America alone.^[15] Message forums (a specific structure of social media) arose with the BBS phenomenon throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. When the Internet arrived in the mid-1990s, message forums migrated online, becoming Internet forums, primarily due to cheaper per-person access as well as the ability to handle far more people simultaneously than telco modem banks.


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