And even when it was available, the bandwidth was small enough that you were a little limited in what you could transfer, and how quickly it could get there. I

And even when it was available, the bandwidth was small enough that you were a little limited in what you could transfer, and how quickly it could get there. I remember circa 1989 when my school (RPI) got onto NYSERNET, at what I believe was a 56kbps link. How much correspondence can be shoved through a pipe that size? Around that same timeframe, outside of academia, us hobbyists that wanted more widespread communication were relying on things like FidoNet[1]. That would package up a BBS's messages and ship them out on a nightly basis -- to a limited number of nodes (I think), so it could take quite a while for messages to propagate to the entire network. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FidoNet