David Weir :v_enby:<p>Was looking at the source to a very early arXiv paper (<a href="https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9210243" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="">arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9210243</span><span class="invisible"></span></a>). The PDF is unavailable, for reasons that are obscure ("pre-1996 submission which cannot be processed"). But there's a lot of history in the source code: it looks like it was submitted, as a single file, emailed from BITNET to the arXiv via a gateway. It also uses a now-obscure TeX package phyzzx (<a href="https://ctan.org/tex-archive/obsolete/macros/phyzzx" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" translate="no" target="_blank"><span class="invisible">https://</span><span class="ellipsis">ctan.org/tex-archive/obsolete/</span><span class="invisible">macros/phyzzx</span></a>).</p><p>I know I'll sound like a young person when I say this but I'd love to know how that worked in practice and what it was like to be in academia before everyone had access to a TCP/IP internet connection but after internetworked computers were ubiquitous. Sort of like the TV series Halt and Catch Fire but with physicists.</p><p><a href="https://mementomori.social/tags/arXiv" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>arXiv</span></a> <a href="https://mementomori.social/tags/BITNET" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>BITNET</span></a> <a href="https://mementomori.social/tags/TeX" class="mention hashtag" rel="nofollow noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">#<span>TeX</span></a></p>