> Couldn't you just sign off if you had other things to do, and answer later in the same conversation? Sort of, but back then the expectations were different.

> Couldn't you just sign off if you had other things to do, and answer later in the same conversation? Sort of, but back then the expectations were different. It would have been uncommon, and sometimes impolite, to come back to a conversation several hours or minutes later as if there was no official end. Feels weird now but having lived in the original chat room era, in which our parents' phone calls interrupted our internet connection, it was pretty different back then.