any of allegra, philabs, cmcl2, or rutgers. The last of these was on the Arpanet, making it possible for me to reach anyone on that network with a bang-path like "marob!phri!rutgers!mit-xx!someone", where "mit-xx" was an Arpanet host. Philabs, on the other hand, led into the core of the uucp network: via linus, it could reach decvax, and from decvax, any of such major sites as seismo, ihnp4, and others that "everyone" knew paths to. So rather than having a fixed address, one published a partial "bang path" relative to well-known addresses: mine was "...!phri!marob!magpie!cowan", and it was assumed that anyone knew or could find out how to reach phri. Later, things changed and my partial path became "...uunet!hombre!marob!magpie!cowan", uunet having taken over seismo's role as major hub. The system was unstable and messy, and email went hop-by-hop, often taking a day to a week arrive, depending on the schedules of phone calls between systems. But it was a whole lot better than nothing. My wording with relation to 1) is a little unclear -- I should have said "tethered to a single computer, to the exclusion of all others, for the duration of a connection", or something similar. If I get a chance to expand on this in the future, it might be interesting to delve into acoustic couplers, modems, and the legal intricacies of the AT&T monopoly. I'll point out just one minor correction. The problem wasn't that there was a fixed set of hosts, exactly, and it wasn't