I can bring you back a little further than BBS system. I was in University n Europe in the 1980s and thanks to IBM European Universities got free access to a Eu

I can bring you back a little further than BBS system. I was in University n Europe in the 1980s and thanks to IBM European Universities got free access to a European academic research network (EARN). We soon discovered that you could use various gateways to get stuff off the much more developed US academic / defense research network called internet called ARPANET. The most reliable way of communicating was to use specially constructed emails and the servers would send files back in ASCII encoded pieces also by email that you had to reconstruct to get the original files. It always amused me that the biggest server around was hosted by "White Sands Missile Base" and I downloaded a lot of stuff from there. It is worth noting that back in those days you couldn't just type an email as John@company.com. You needed to tell the mail server what path it needed to take to get to the recipient. We developed quite ingenuous ways of bouncing emails around various connected networks in order to get them to our intended destinations.