back in the early 90s, it was very difficult to find a means for connecting to the internet.
for the very few who did have (pre-www) internet access, it was via their university or (much less likely) through a large corporation.
and then, in october of 1994, a local nonprofit started Edmonton FreeNet: for $25 per year, you got an e-mail address, usenet access, shell access to lynx and pine, and 1mb of file storage
i hung on to my account so i'd always have access to a shell no matter where I was in the world. my friends used it as a cheap ISP for years; they would eventually add SLIP/PPP.
i always wondered how the freenet initiative got started - and learned recently that it was all thanks to the NPTN Blue Book: a National Public Telecomputing Network that distributed a software package called FreePort, containing all of the sub-modules necessary to delivery dial-up access to a small community.
the whole NTPN concept itself was way ahead of its time, and i'd love to read a book on it some day.
for the time being, i'm overjoyed to see that there have been many articles written on freenets, and @ernie's is one of the best:
https://tedium.co/2022/04/13/internet-free-net-history/
