By 1988 you had interesting collaborations over the internet using Xwindows and CMU's various Andrew explorations. IIRC it was too slow to do remote computing b

By 1988 you had interesting collaborations over the internet using Xwindows and CMU's various Andrew explorations. IIRC it was too slow to do remote computing but you could load binaries over AFS from, say, MIT's network to run on a system at CMU (and vice versa). Most consumer networking, if you could call it that, was over the proprietary Compuserve, AOL, services as well as over Fidonet, Usenet (using uucp for point-to-point and nntp for networked servers). Colleges and universities also had BITNET, utilizing IBM's RSCS over SNA (mostly text, mostly IBM mainframes but not exclusively, for point to point email or mailing lists).