So I'll add a few more cents. Packet died in the US because it was too popular for what it could do. The number of For Sale messages and announcements that were sent worldwide just overwhelmed users and BBSs. It came to the point that there was too much content and nothing that you wanted to read.
And while there were faster networks, 1200 bps was the standard and it was slow. And it gets real slow when you add other 1200 baud nodes or digipeaters to the path. And BTW, you will never even get 1200 bps sustained throughput, as the turn-around for most radios is abysmal. And in this entire thread, I'm surprised that I haven't seen any comments about D-STAR! 960 bps is built into every radio and the ID-1 can do 128 kbps. It's not AX.25, but it is packet digital data. It's pretty cool to put two ID-1s back to back and watch the amount of data that can be transfered. And since the ID-1 have Ethernet jacks, that means that you can do any Internet protocol that you want.
