Oh, gods, yes. Dawn of Networking indeed. alt.startrek.creative, the Yahoo! mailing lists, fanfiction.net, the pair-specific sites, BNFs, the sweet sound of the modem handshake (in my case, phone time was expensive but cheaper after 10pm, so I waited impatiently that last minute...), The Shi'ar Coffee Story, that fic where it turned out Gambit was the time-displaced amnesiac son of Charles Xavier and Lilandra, the sheer impact of reading your first explicit slash fic (after all, I lived in a place where phone time was expensive, but cheaper after 10pm...), the warm glomping feeling of having a reader give you a nice comment (I still get that), the way almost every pair, by contemporary standards, was rare, so you cherished every fic.