"In fact FIDONET and the like probably had already met that bar, in an early PoC sense. Lots of folks in that space had the vision of at least a nationwide netw

"In fact FIDONET and the like probably had already met that bar, in an early PoC sense. Lots of folks in that space had the vision of at least a nationwide network of 24x7 connected bbs' if not the entire picture. You also had a lot of guys working in private industry, who operated small "national" or regional networks between a few sites at that point." Also, distinct from BBS culture, many people in 1990 had telenet[1] access (not telnet) from local dialups and could connect to computers all over the country in that fashion. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telenet