[asadotzler]

That's not how it "originally happened." Perhaps you're too young to remember the days before AOL and CompuServe, but email was being used more than a decade before those services. When those services started bringing messagint to consumers, yes, they had some proprietary set-ups but that was not how it "originally happened" -- that was a short-term glitch in the much longer and more open history of email.

[unclebunkers]

I am old enough to remember. Actually, because my mother worked at a university in engineering while I was in another city going to university, I could email her. It was crazy!!! My bestie and I then tried to figure out how it worked, and spammed the entire college with a "Happy Holidays Laidies" email. (It was a simpler time).

That said, no one else was using it back then unless you worked military or university. Once it started to commercialize, then you had all the walled gardens. So although you're technically correct, BBS's were still the majority of the way we were connecting back then.