. . . simply because the communications to make it didn't exist. All you had were first a few friends, and later, the magazines. The community as we know it started to develop when the internet arrived, but it was pretty limited until broadband came along. To give a flavour of what those days were like, I remember a friend of mine who was asked to evaluate a program — size about about 54 Mb, IIRC. The area he lived in was not equipped for broadband, and on his dial-up modem, the predicted download time was 16 hours, and there was no way his phone line was going to remain stable for that long. Fortunately for him, I had just got my first broadband link, so I downloaded it for him, and I think it took me about 30 minutes.
