those were the good old days. Fidonet, ThousandOaks, X/Y and then Z-modem vs. Kermit transfer protocols. I loved Kermit when talking to dissimilar systems. I laughed when I think IBM put Kermit and XModem on their systems.
How about all the unarchiving - Arc, Uncompress, PKZip.
Modems from 300->1200->2400->9600->14.4/bis, 33 then monster 56k. I can still remember the sounds of training...
Anyone still remember Hayes command set?
I spent hours tweaking my modem setup string. While the default worked, my tweaked string got everything out of my modem that it had available.