I worked at a uni that had usenet, soon after graduating. There were newsgroups about everything, personally most mornings at work I'd look at comp.lang.c and o

I worked at a uni that had usenet, soon after graduating. There were newsgroups about everything, personally most mornings at work I'd look at comp.lang.c and others it was a great resource for learning - it was one place and all the uni's in the world were connected to it. I learnt so much from it. Messages were transferred overnight by copying the latest changes between each uni, you could post to the use group of choice using a usenet client. I was very excited to have access to it at the time, it was rare to have a connection outside of a uni. There were source code feeds to where you could download the latest sources and try to compile them yourself, I remember fiddling with things like flex and bison. It was full nerd - pretty well everyone was an academic, student or worked at a uni or research lab, you'd have contact in almost real time with anyone - this was a new thing. You'd interface with it using a glass tty - I had a vt52 which connected to a Sun 3 box, which was our development computer. I remember getting a 300 baud modem and connecting to it at night from home with my PC, or maybe it was my amstrad still, PC's were very expensive still. It was a fun time. Edit: just remembered we only had one dial in modem to the uni, and I'd use it to dial in from home, I remember we used to fight over access to it - eventually they got a second one because the sys admin was sick of not being able to get access to the network at night. They to were very expensive, I think they were 2400 or maybe even 4800 bps - a crazy speed then.