For BBSs, you're correct. Usenet (and email) used UUCP, which is actually much closer in concept I think here. UUCP is a store-and-forward mechanism, not depen

For BBSs, you're correct. Usenet (and email) used UUCP, which is actually much closer in concept I think here. UUCP is a store-and-forward mechanism, not dependent on a real-time connection to a particular server. I used to run a node, connected to a guy I'd met who worked for an ISP. He had, gasp, a full-time network connection via ISDN; pretty magical in these days of dial up. So, Usenet feeds were configured on my own little system, essentially subscribing to the newsgroups I wanted. Periodically, it would dial out to the other gent, upload any new posts from me, and download anything new on those newsgroups. My email came and went the same way. Naturally, what I got was a subset of what he had accessible. While I never used this functionality, I could have had others call up to me, and I would just be an intermediate link in the chain. RFC 976 (https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc976 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc976) describes how this works for email, including SMTP over UUCP.