alt Hacker NewsFrom my days... this is what an old photo of a "proper" BBS looked like https://beeline.org/beeline/?view=a29ed68f4f4d53 (note the wire wrapped custom modem controller) - the description is "Original Apple IIe with 11 modems and two 4-port homemade serial cards"
And to keep better time, https://beeline.org/beeline/?view=c0a8000daa11ca
It was later upgraded to a 486 https://beeline.org/beeline/?view=188870d0bbc894
Yeah this is a lot closer to the home BBS I grew up around. We had 20+ phone lines coming into our house all in a bundle going through the attic and dropping down into my dads "office" within the house. That led to a shelf full of modems, where I had to go find an inactive one and shut it off to free up a line. All so I could go turn on the modem in my room, because it was time to play a game with a friend across town.
Over time the BBS grew into us being a local dialup ISP as my Dad dug deeper into self employeement in the computer age.