https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP#Bang_path
Munnari being the UUCP connection between Australia and the rest of the world, run by Robert Elz:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Robert_Elz
https://dif.vic.gov.au/editorial/4194-a/a-computer-server-an...
running Usenet news and people paying for newsgroups to subsidize the phone bill to Hawaii.
Dial up bulletin boards, connecting via FIDOnet, then slowly being absorbed into Usenet groups and mailing lists.
gopher servers, ftp servers, spam email, "endless September"...
I'm old :)
BTW I am not a true veteran, all of that you could see just 20 years ago.
an amazing new vector-based animation technology called Future Splash that had nothing to do with Adobe or Macromedia.
While probably not "internet" by definition, it was a global network that allowed people to exchange information relatively free, with a couple days latency.
It had discussion groups much like Usenet, and I vividly remember dialing my local BBS every 30-60 minutes when waiting for a reply to a discussion :)
Oh, you meant ancient? Using a borrowed userid to access a VAX at the university to browse Usenet and use FTP servers. No web or even gopher yet, so your guide was FTP directories published in Usenet. And a T1 link (1.5Mbps) was fast. From the university to the world that is. Your personal dialup was good if it was 2400bps.
And the excitement from Mosaic and watching coffee pots empty. Jennycam.
Rec.humor.funny
I'm not a veteran by far but I had - with very little merit - the honor to talk with him about that period.
Such a nice person. He knew had how important his work had been but as well that he was one among the tens of people who were keys to this collective achievement.
In respect to his own modesty, there is a link to the Internet pioneers' Wikipedia page - where his role is explained among all the other pioneers: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_pioneers
For the uninitiated: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet
Another big one was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymnet
The reason some big online providers (some or all of, for example: AOL, CompuServ, Prodigy) had so many local access numbers (which was important since long-distance was so expensive) was that those numbers were actually Telenet / Tymnet, which the client used to connect to the service.
Connecting to the web via dial-up AOL looked (maybe still looks?) like:
Browser <-> HTTP(S) <-> (I forget this component) <-> AOL client <-> Modem <-> PSTN <-> X.25 <-> AOL backend <-> HTTP(S) <-> Website
Is the part that I’m forgetting SLIP/PPP? I forget how that was implemented in Windows… Possibly both the browser and the AOL client talked to that.
(That was all after you could use AOL for TCP/IP, which wasn’t always the case.)
AOL's seekrit superpower when they were "$CITYNAME Online" for several values of $CITY, as i was told, was that they ran on a big insurance company Stratus cluster as a slack time job and had access to both the compute time and the inbound X.25 for "free" for a while there.
which I still use actually, peep my username :)
