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**Lostgallifreyan** · March 20th 12, 10:54 PM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion

MotoFox confucius-
wrote in
:

Not strictly the forerunner to the Usenet, since Usenet and BBSes pretty
much co-existed for much of their existance. I'd say they were more of a
fore-runner to the World Wide Web, although many had services similar to
what you'd find on Usenet ("talkers", we used to call those.)

Most were accessed via a direct dial-up line (i.e. a regular f0ne number
you'd call with your modem), so they definitely had a sense of localism,
since most, if not all, I've known about of were never made available via
WATS or 0800 numbers. In later years many BBSes added TCP-IP connectivity,
effectively making them available to anybody in the world with a telnet
client.

Nice. I think that's the clearest vison I've seen of it yet. It fits the
various vague memories I have, of people using phones to connect to things
that weren't yet part of a wider internet. I guess my next question is: what
things were pre TCP/IP, that still have meaning since TCP/IP came to pass?

(I'm not suggesting any meaning or lack of it, just wondering about
continuity).