[grkvlt]

Actually the term was invented long before Internet access was widely available, let alone high speed. It describes transfering data between computers located in the same room (or building) using floppy disks. The alternative was to use some kind of networking, like 10baseT coax ethernet, or one of the many other competing standards, that existed back in the early eighties.

And before the Internet was commonplace, people had to use data lines provisioned by the telephone company to link distant offices, and could also send data that way, as larger companies still do.