Also arrived at via
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/20/usenet_duke_server/ , which also has a link to a 1992 history (
http://www.virtualschool.edu/mon/Internet/HaubenEvolutionNet... ).
By the way, not all in the Duke piece is to be taken as gospel. I think the 1983 "get a file from one computer to another across the country" may actually have been UUCP (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UUCP ). And Arpanet was already on, with FTP, etc. although at relatively few sites.
(A couple of years later, getting a complete Emacs tarball from prep.ai.mit.edu was still a sporting proposition - watching hash characters march across the terminal on an ftp without auto-resume - actually, no resume at all, just retry ...)
