If you were a geek and online in (not least) UK academia in the 1980s and early 1990s, you were probably not using TCP/IP except on the local LAN of the Computer Science department. This was because people who sat on committees and who were therefore very Clever™ had decided what your network should be like, viz: a horrible glorified phone network where other prefabricated computer services would TellYouWhatYouNeedToKnow™.
This is the story of that network:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/osi-the-internet-that-wasnt
Aside: one of the more interesting things about this design was that it shared later architectural aspects with Tor Onion Networking – viz: The Dark Net – e.g. Circuit-Switching, probably for equally architectural reasons.
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