Not relevant to the article, but for the history of UK academic networking mentioned in various comments, Wikipedia's account looks about right, though I'm not

Not relevant to the article, but for the history of UK academic networking mentioned in various comments, Wikipedia's account looks about right, though I'm not sure it's up-to-date concerning the regions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JANET I was using SRCnet in 1981, when Liverpool Physics had a dedicated link to Daresbury (national lab) whose speed I don't remember at that stage. Unfortunately the infamous PDP11 "terminal concentrators" for interactive use then were horribly unreliable. RJE to the cloud, where analyses ran, worked well.