Much the same here. I dug up this page in Wikipedia when I was reminiscing about my university's network. In my first year there was no "internet" access per se

Much the same here. I dug up this page in Wikipedia when I was reminiscing about my university's network. In my first year there was no "internet" access per se, but you could send email from the Vax VMS accounts via JANET to other sites. Then the next (?) year there was access to the "PAD" (Packet Assembler Disassembler) to JANET, from which one could issue a command to connect to an X.25 address. I still remember the number of NSFNet relay, 00004001018057 [1], which in turn allowed you to telnet to other internet services. I think I logged into Nyx and a few other BBS-like things. Then I did an industry year at ICL, a British computer company long-since engulfed by Fujitsu, where they were also X.25 focused for big networks and Novell Netware focused for small networks - but the web was starting to be a big deal and I couldn't get anyone to listen. I have an anecdote about downloading the SLS Linux distro via an archive re-mailer that I won't bore you with right now :) Then, in my final year back at the university, the web seemed to explode and the X.25 stuff had more or less disappeared. In retrospect it's amazing how quickly this changeover happened, even if it had been bulbbing away in the background for a long long time. From my perspective the WWW looked like the catalyst that pushed everything in favour of TCP/IP. [1] If I remember rightly, the adjacent address 00004001018056 was another Vax somewhere that hosted a bunch of LaTeX stuff?