I remember going “on-line” with my Tandy Color Computer using an external 300 baud dial-up modem. The service was StarText and it had forums similar to this one and news provided by the Star Telegram.
Later, on a PC, using the Mosaic browser to look at Gopher sites, as there was practically no WWW pages to look at. Those Gopher sites had tons of great info.
Sample from StarText:
( 1/05/90-11:21 am)
The StarTexan’s Forum
Volume 7, Number 5 - Friday, January 5, 1990
Copyright (c) 1989, StarText
Moderator/Editor: William (Bill) Manly
Mail Code: FORUM
Size of this update 5,945 Bytes
See the FORUMBIOS keyword for the biographies of regular column participants.
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Current topics:
1. Answering Fan Mail (if I were on fire, they’d fan me)
2. Short Bytes
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Coco yes! Also used Timex Sinclair and Tom Mix Software.