Comment by ggm

It was slower. In a beneficial way.

There was a low enough cohort you could talk to people of some significance or notoriety and get a response.

The barrier between email and news was dilute, osmotic pressure effects meant things leaked.

A lot of specialist interest lists on BITNET or the European news network (Jacob Palme in Sweden ran something I used to read on a dec-10) stayed in their own island, so the middle east camel breeding BITNET mailing list which ran out of the hospital network on IBM hardware didn't bridge but comp.lang.c went to a lot of places.

BDFL is not quite the tone but the "great renaming" was imposed not consensus. Likewise Brad Templeton and others first forays into commercial service came as a bit of a surprise.

Honeydanber (Peter Honeyman and somebody else) made !addressing go away and we loved it but they persisted in corners. Decnet also meant user::path forms so there was a lot of background processing masking things.

people got upset about surprising things. Kremvax made some people very angry.

Mark V Shaney was funny but punking the net.singles people was less funny but when we found out everyone was a construct of Rob Pike's imagination it became funny again.

BIFF WAS REAL.

Many things like "real programmers don't eat quiche" pre-dated Usenet but got mothered in. We did paper samizdat spoof tech papers in snailmail long after Usenet made them a bit redundant.