Sounds familiar. BBSes is what got me interested in coding. I would mod the BBS and I got to show everyone and release mod files to other BBS owners. We ran C-NET variants at the time.

I switched to PC in the 1990s and WWIV was the closest to CNET, and if you registered (paid) you got the source code. There was also inter-BBS networking available that predated (public) email and newsgroups.