• Troy@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      No. Most were direct dial servers. Some used FIDOnet for inter-BBS messaging.

      Source: I hosted one until 1997.

          • caseyweederman@lemmy.ca
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            11 months ago

            Well that’s certainly not true in many practical senses.
            Was ARPANET global? That was a proto internet but certainly wasn’t ever intended to be global.
            The full scope of undersea cables and satellites were probably not considered in the early days of Internet Proper. Even today, there are all kinds of barriers to the internet truly being considered to be “global”, from companies semi-benignly tailoring their content, to China just having a completely separate internet. With licensing and local laws and firewalls and taxes and asynchronous infrastructure development and paywalls, I don’t think you can say that “global” is the property that sets the internet apart from BBSes.