In Florida the MajorBBS scene called them GTs. In my opinion, the split-screen chat really brought people together. But chat in general was the community thing, along with a few of the door games. Like my old TW2002 opponent, we're still in touch. My little bro went to a couple of those GTs. In retrospect, if I had kids, I wouldn't want them involved in that, because some of those BBS people were questionably creepy.

In one way, Internet chats haven't caught on to what we had in 1989, which was seeing every keystroke from everyone simultaneously in separate panels. Line by line (IRC style) is less personal by comparison. Watching the keystrokes and edits unfold, it's more compelling, and MajorBBS deserves credit for that unique multiuser experience which required specialized hardware. Multitasking > 2 phone lines was rare because fast PCs could barely multitask 2 modems with DESQView or OS/2. Windows did not have any multitasking capability yet. And only OS/2 had any concept of prioritizing the CPU. So most BBS doors were limited to "turn based" games where you play after somebody else (your turn, like RISK) unless you had MajorBBS which had low-latency fast action battlefields like Flash Attack. What you now call AJAX (single page apps) we could do that in the 80s with ANSI position codes, which you're just starting to see today on Facebook, where you can see content updating without a page refresh. We were severely limited to an 80x23 grid with only 16 foreground colors, but we made it amazing.