Peter Ludemann on Nostr: You were fortunate to only have had to deal with Arpanet and uucp ... we un-Americans ...

You were fortunate to only have had to deal with Arpanet and uucp ... we un-Americans had to also deal with other gateways and I recall the joys of figuring out the correct incantation of "!", "@", "%" to send/receive email (Bitnet, Fidonet, and others I no longer remember)
Even though email was primitive in those days, it really helped ... I was working with an Australian researcher and we could usually get 2 messages back-and-forth per day, even with the timezone differences and store-and-forward delays. And Usenet was fabulous in the days before undergrads were allowed on (and in my somewhat esoteric area, even after AOLers were allowed on).