more the latter. long ago, to get access to mail or usenet you generally were a technically minded person at one of a few universities or large corporations li

more the latter. long ago, to get access to mail or usenet you generally were a technically minded person at one of a few universities or large corporations like DEC. to give a sense of the scale involved, check out http://olduse.net/blog/current_usenet_map/ http://olduse.net/blog/current_usenet_map/ . There were on the order of between dozens and hundreds of machines, and you would send mail to a person on a given machine by figuring out (by hand?) a path from your machine to that machine and include the names of all the machines in a "bang path" http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bang-path.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/bang-path.html Also, before SMTP there was UUCP (which was used for both mail and usenet).