Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL were three of the largest BBS firms and were being the 1st to migrate to the Internet in the 1990s. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-1990s, BBSes numbered in the tens of hundreds in North America on your own. Message discussion boards (a unique structure of social media) arose with the BBS phenomenon all through the eighties and early nineteen nineties.