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Growing up in the 80ies-90ies, there was no social media, no instant-messaging.
All information you could find about computing was either to be found in books or magazines or if you were lucky at a local computer club.
Modems brought connecting from your home to the outside world into existence via Bulletin Boards. This very long documentary telling the entire history of BulletinBoards and its origins. BBSDOC
The systems provide a way to connect with other online users, share/trade knowledge and files before Napster/Limewire/Kazaa.
A lot of companies offered public bulletin boards as a way to provide user-support , universities, libraries, all of them offered some form of interaction.
Here is nice more recent documentary BBSNEW about the BBS history and current evolution
But the Pirate scene offered world-wide connections and software . I was however not too heavily involved in the illegal software trading but rather the DEMOSCENE
BBSes were accessed using Modems and an analog-telephone line (like a fax) which ment you had to take into account the cost of calling/dialing a local-area,other-area and more importantly foreign-country phonenumber.
With Ethernet/Internet/Linux rising accessing BBSes moved away from the phone-lines towards TCP/IP, SLIP and other means of connecting.
In recent years the evolution of ESP IoT devices has sparked the creation of Wifi-modems which basically connect to your serial port like a modem and translate the HAYES command set. into TCP/IP thus allowing your retro-computer to connect to BBSes via the Internet.
Vice-versa it also allows for Retro-computers to be used as BBSes again by using telnet as a service to connect to them.
There are still BBSes who still run the oldschool way , a real modem on an analog phone line.
You can find a list of Atari specific BBSes here ATARIBBS