Usenet was distributed via dialup modems via UUCP ("Unix to Unix copy"); Internet transport via the NNTP protocol was added later. Most Usenet sites were not o

Usenet was distributed via dialup modems via UUCP ("Unix to Unix copy"); Internet transport via the NNTP protocol was added later. Most Usenet sites were not on the Internet. This was the 80s, the era of crazy expensive long distance phone calls. At that time, commercial use of the Internet was illegal. Usenet was also in effect a federation of BBSs. Small sites would find a neighbor, hopefully a local phone call away, willing to exchange data; you'd set up a cron job to make calls at specific times and new data would be exchanged in both directions. In the early days, to send mail you had to know a route: send this message to machine A via UUCP mail, then ask A to send it to B via UUCP mail, then B will send it to ucbvax at Berkeley, which is on the Arpanet (the core of what would become the Internet) and have it send to Janus, on Berkeley's separate Bitnet network: all four hosts would be in the address.