is the bargain that was, with some reluctance,
accepted around 1992 – a crucial year, as we shall see.

· · · · ·

Changing conditions of computer networking have,
throughout this story, had greater effect than the changing technology
of the computers themselves. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, tools
such as Unix and games like ‘Spacewar!’ spread through
outposts of the early Internet much as, in the dark ages, classical
texts flowed down monastic libraries along the Rhine and the Loire,
always subtly rewritten until it seemed no definitive version remained.
(We have already seen what this did to ‘Advent’.)
By the mid-1980s, universities and institutions across at least the
Western world were securely networked, but the same could not yet be
said of home computers and small businesses.

Enthusiasts for writing interactive fiction could
achieve little until there wasenough mutual contact for non-commercially
distributed design systems and games to spread around. Usenet, a
wide-ranging system of discussion forums or “newsgroups”,
was created in 1979 and roughly doubled in usage each year:
but in 1985 it still only accounted for 375 postings per day, across
all topics combined, and as late as 1989 it was still possible for a
single person to skim through the entire traffic. In America, the hundreds
of local dial-up bulletin board systems (BBSs) and their big brother,
the American CompuServe service, had greater effect. Much as the creators
of Usenet called it “the poor man's ARPANET”, bulletin
boards were a poor man's FTP: allowing downloading of files from archives
with only a modem and without the need for a university or corporate
Internet connection. Even as late as 1993, downloads of ‘Curses’
(say) from CompuServe