I'd have to agree with Dave on this. (BBN was also famous for its "Butterfly" super computer).
Ed, thanks for the vote of confidence.
My first fulltime connection to the Internet was 1982. More accurately was a part "legitimate" DARPA connection and a predominance of "underground" uucp (Unix to Unix Communication Protocol) connections.
And applications, like email and netnews, flowed over the conglomerate of ARPANET, uucp, BITNET, and a few others I can't think of at the moment. Not quite seamlessly, but not too bad. The most visible problem for the user was the addressing. If you sent email to me (I was at a UUCP portion of "the net" at the time) from ARPANET, you'd have to reflect both addressing conventions in a sorta' complex address. Making it work on a technical level was somewhat harder; I've been involved in the design of a couple of email gateways between such networks.
Back then, pre World Wide Web, in the space of a couple of hours you could read virtually everything that was posted to the Internet that day.
I assume that by "posted" you mean the netnews that flowed over the USENET logical network. You couldn't possibly be including all the email around the network, or even just email to distribution lists. And you couldn't possibly be counting the file transfers and other apps. (BTW, it is worth reflecting on the fact that the last category was really the rationale for building ARPANET in the first place, while today it is a miniscule minority of Internet traffic.)
Even limiting it to netnews, you'd be awfully busy and a fast reader to get to all of it -- but yeah, it might have been physically possible. (I kinda' doubt it, but we're not off by orders of magnitude here.) In '82, I read maybe a half-dozen newsgroups, and that took me 1/2 hour to an hour every morning. And there were -- what? -- perhaps 50-100 newsgroups then.
Fun topic, even if irrelevant to ShopTalk. DaveT
