Believe it or not, the Web was not the first attempt at building a worldwide online community. Cutting edge geeks have been using online services such as Compuserve all the way back to the early 1980's. There were thousands of other privately run Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) as well, which served the general interest of curious nerds and researchers from around the world. Perhaps the most ambitious project was the French system Minitel, but it never caught on in the rest of the world and eventually faded into obscurity. Experiences on these BBS was poor by today's standards. There was no graphics or even color. There was no sound except of course the obnoxious beeps and gurgles a modem makes when it it initiates a dial-up connection to a server. Bandwidth was also very slow compared to today's speeds. Typical operating speeds were between 300 and 1200 baud. Today, a typical broadband connection is thousands of times faster than this.