Back in the stone age, you just needed someone that would let you connect to their server. The whole point is that it's distributed, not a central, closed syste

Back in the stone age, you just needed someone that would let you connect to their server. The whole point is that it's distributed, not a central, closed system. That server might have limits on the groups they wanted to host through them (e.g. the binaries groups), but you could do a lot with that. UUCP was the protocol used for batching and unbatching file transfers, which served both Usenet messages and email. (I had both on my Amiga, through dialup, for some years.)