BITNET! How we used to dream of BITNET! Why, when I was a lad, we had to remember own own paths to the internet. My first internet-reachable email address was something like this:

...{uunet|ihnp4}!aaa!tarpit!vicstoy!mjg

Yes, the academic elites had BITNET and @-routing for internet email. The rest of poor saps had to rely on the UUCP network. Spooling up email and usenet postings... waiting for the times of day when long-distance calling was cheaper, and hop by painful hop forwarding messages along toward the internet core.

And we didn't have Pine, we had Elm... or mailx! Archie? Oh yes, that thing that tried to replace perfectly-functional thousand-page listings of FTP sites...

Curmudgeonry indeed :)