Before there was the internet, many UNIX computers communicated by calling each other on telephone modems a few times a day. Among the exchanged texts were emai

Before there was the internet, many UNIX computers communicated by calling each other on telephone modems a few times a day. Among the exchanged texts were email and the discussion blog called usenet. In the early there were only a few dozen to few hundred computers, mainly in universities and computer companies. You list all the networked computers in a single file called /etc/hosts. In the late 1980s universal protocols and funding from Senator Al Gores 1991 Information Superhighway legislation allowed the computers anywhere in the world to interconnect. My usenet email address from 1976 still works.