[msla]

Big networks were gated in and out of the Internet, such as UUCP and BITNET. (UUCP for Unix systems, BITNET for IBM mainframes.) This had interesting effects on email addresses:

http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/the_hideous_name/

Make sense of this one:

    research!ucbvax!@cmu-cs-pt.arpa:@CMU-ITC-LINUS:dave%CMU-ITC-LINUS@CMU-CS-PT

Sourceforge still has Ifmail, an Internet to Fidonet email gateway:

http://ifmail.sourceforge.net/

FidoNet is a network of BBSes which has email and Usenet-like discussion boards called echoes.

[easrng]

Is that email address even real? I can understand some of it but not all. Looks like UUCP to research, UUCP to ucbvax, somehow send to cmu-cs-pt.arpa, idk what's up with CMU-ITC-LINUS, email to dave%CMU-ITC-LINUS@CMU-CS-PT, which forwards to dave@CMU-ITC-LINUS

[bane]

That's really interesting! Just to be clear in my post I'm referring to bog standard email addresses not fidonet...which was also very common at the time.

I'm not aware of any fidonet<--> internet bridges during that time period but I suppose their could have been. AFAIK fido relays all occurred via POTS sync calls between BBSs