alt Hacker NewsToo young to have used it but I watched the BBS documentary recently and what surprised me was how much stuff was already possible pre-internet
A lot of stuff I would typically associate with the internet like pirating, forums, mail, large scale multiplayer games actually predates it
Pre-World Wide Web, strictly, as the Internet pre-dated Fidonet by some years. The Internet almost, but not quite, preceded Teletext.
But yes, people did all of that many years before it was done on the World Wide Web.
(There's some complexity as to whether Usenet was an Internet thing early on, as it did the whole dial-up-over-PSTN thing, that Fidonet did, quite a lot before settling on mainly NNTP.)
More so that you think. Piracy was not actually most of it. There was a whole thriving shareware system, which in Fidonet was done via FREQs. Tens of thousands of nodes pushing archived shareware softwares, many long since forgotten, around the globe.