[weeeee2]

Are you sure it was '86? I was using IBM's BITNET in 88 from UMASS before Al Gore invented the Internet lol. Email took 2 days to go from Boston to London, passing thru a node in California before routing to the UK. I got on Usenet in 88 or 89, and had fun chats with professors at Caltech and elsewhere using the finger command and talk (with tee pipe to dev/tty and a file, so I can play back the whole session.) I am vague in my memory about how and when I went from being n BITNET to ARPANet/Internet, but I do remember Gore was busy promoting the Information Superhighway around that time, and it was the time the first iteration of excitement around neural networks was cooling off... Memories! Real Genius was a fun movie to watch and an inspiration for getting into lasers.

UPDATE according to ChatGPT:

ARPANET itself began in 1969 at a handful of research universities, so some US universities had access as early as the early 1970s. However, many institutions that didn’t have a direct ARPANET connection joined BITNET in 1981—a store‐and‐forward network that was easier and less expensive to join but often led to long email delays (sometimes on the order of a day or two, especially on international links). By the mid‑to‑late 1980s, with the emergence of NSFNET (which provided a TCP/IP backbone) and the broader adoption of Internet protocols, many universities transitioned from BITNET to the more immediate, real‑time connectivity of the Internet.

In other words, while ARPANET was available to some US universities from the early 1970s, widespread academic use via the modern Internet (with NSFNET and TCP/IP) really picked up in the mid‑1980s. The long delays you remember (such as a two‑day email from Boston to London) were more typical of BITNET’s store‑and‑forward mechanism rather than ARPANET’s near‑real‑time communications.

[linsomniac]

That's funny, because at lunch my coworker mentioned my comment without realizing it was me who made it and he was trying to figure out how we had access to e-mail back then. It might have been '87, no later than mid '88 because that's when I left HP Loveland and I'm quite sure it happened before then. I'd put money on the e-mail having been sent with bang-paths.

You mention being on Usenet in 88 or 89, which was after "the great reorganization". I was on Usenet for a while before the reorg, so that'd cement the earlier end at 85-86. I definitely had e-mail, but never used BITNET or ARPANet. I do recall sending e-mail to a crazy girl in maybe Tazmania that loved wombats, and it taking <a day turnaround (the girlfriend of a summer student in the lab).

[mlyle]

He didn't say ARPANET. He said Usenet. A whole lot of Usenet was store-and-forward (over UUCP).

https://i.imgur.com/V8CmQV4.gif

[weeeee2]

Yes but I was referring to "email him ... [in 1986]" and wondering about what he meant by "email" exactly in 1986...