Didn't domain names used to be backwards and wasn't there something horrid were you had to somehow wrangle an address through nfs.net or something strange (and there was a dog called fido), and much of the internet was based around vibrating strings, and not the eleven-dimensional sort, oh no, real wet string.
Not that I can think of, but I may be missing something. Unless you're remembering
X.400 email addresses, such as:
G=Georg; S=Hansen; O=sintef; OU=delab; PRMD=uninett; ADMD=uninett; C=no
Back around 1990, I was working for a place that supplied information-service providers (we and others supplied the databases, and they built them into an overall technical information service that was bought by major research companies and so on). They were mostly accessed by dial-up packet-switching networks such as Telenet and Tymnet (before X.25 and the Internet, this!) In time, each provider introduced a closed email system that allowed us, as suppliers, to communicate with staff from that provider and its customers. We also used Compuserve, but again as a closed system allowing email with other Compuserve users.
Gradually, these systems began to open up with interconnections to customers' private systems and so on. To communicate between systems, we used to build X.400 addresses with our bare hands from directories. They worked at least 30% of the time.
SMTP was a revelation
![Thumbs Up :thumbsup:](/forum/Smileys/classic/thumbsup.gif)
We quickly moved most of our email to the provider who was first to adopt it. Then, a year or two later, the nascent Internet was opened up beyond academia to the likes of us, who were not academic but provided services to academia.
We celebrated by launching our first Gopher server, which we duly closed down months later after our first Web site launched.