Go bears!

    > Many early modems were acoustic couplers attached to telephone handsets using Velcro — one part was a microphone, the other a speaker. You connected by dialling the phone...
    > 
    > Tools like the Unix-to-Unix Copy Program (UUCP) used scripts that called cu or similar tools to establish connections, then transferred data...
    > 
    > UUCP was how we sent mail, read network news, and received (small) files. For much of the research community, it effectively was the network...
    >
    > Sockets changed all this.
    > 
    > Source: https://blog.apnic.net/2026/07/28/hooray-for-the-sockets-interface

So much has changed... yet so much has not... All are pure marvels and based on dear miracles...

The article kind of misses out on the networking standards of the time - there were many of which TCP and IP were just one, most of the rest were either proprietary (DNA SNA BNA etc) and incompatible, or owned by telecoms who wanted to be able to charge per packet(X.25).

TCP/IP won (IMHO) because the implementation was open source, and because no one was going to make a buck by locking others out (or charging them for the right to build an implementation). Plus there was a working reference implementation available for the taking