[peteri]

We did have walled gardens. I had accounts on Compuserve, bix, cix, MCIMail with a college account that did mail with bang path addressing over uucp (this is in 1986/7).

Most of the UKs email over uucp came in via the ukc gateway and IIRC I think I was charged something like 4p/1K for email that was international at that point. From memory my usenet feed came via a US bank in the City and was over a telebit trailblazer modem.

By 1990 I'm pretty sure that cix,MCIMail and Compuserve all at least had gateways to SMTP mail and within a few years it all became more more transparent and free.