Sellam Ismail wrote: Okay, I took your original post to mean something more than you had intended. Sorry. I'd be far more interested in getting people's recollections of that period on the record, so to speak, than being "right." It's a big world, other people would have seen/remembered different things out there... Hell, maybe I was stuck in a backwater and missed all the action, who knows? As I said, or meant, open source would have changed a lot more than the spread of the Internet in a Linux-less universe. So I don't really disagree with you here. And I think we could have a really long discussion of the rise of FOSS and Linux separately even with a very different FOSS movement we still would have seen much the same spread of email and the 'Net. I am content to be viewed as an isolated crackpot if need be -- that was in fact a career goal of a friend of mine in college. ;^) Well, that would be the "other discussion." ;^) But while they were proprietary and so on, they were recognized and acceptable to a very large population. I don't say this to take anything away from the BBSes, which were still cruising along in this period; it would be interesting to see if anyone can dig up some contemporary statistics about users in the two categories. But the point was that since these services were popular, they did introduce a significant user segment to the online world including email, and they did allow email addressed to external users, all of which increased what we'd now call the network effect of Internet and email adoption. Maybe yes, maybe no. This is also the era where "open systems" were being deployed on a large scale in the corporate world, and access to these systems via TCP/IP from the desktop was a key requirement. And that trend was independent of whether or not the corporation had external IP network connections, though by this period they were sprouting up all over the place too. In that world in New York and Boston if we had to use a PC, we made sure there was an IP stack and if at all possible X Windows on it. For the home users I was talking about earlier there were packages like Trumpet Winsock and Russ Nelson's Crynwr packet drivers. I seem to recall Mac fans taunting me about how easy MacTCP was to setup, but I'm not clear on the timing for that... All I mean to point out is that there were other strong factors behind TCP/IP coming to the Windows/Mac platform. And while the corporate users would pay, the realities of the academic budget ensured that something cheap/free would be available to meet the same needs. Anyways, I hope that at some point you get a chance to write up what you saw happening around that time with the small ISPs and Linux, and share it with us. That goes for the other list members too; I was hoping for a wider response, and especially views from outside the US. I've been focusing on the 1993-4 period because of the way it set the stage for growth once the Web caught on, but feel free to roll forward or backward too. Then again, maybe this is the wrong forum. I'll let the silence be my guide... --Steve.