back then running leased lines would've been way too expensive. So what did the kids running the show did? They got wind of a central office in an older part of Budapest have excess capacity so they rented an apartment in the next building and drilled the wall :D no expensive trenching, no expensive equipment to demultiplex landlines, nothing, just a bunch of wires running straight from the CO equipment into retail modems... We had no idea what we were doing, mind you. I was already doing Linux at the time so among the few installers I was the lucky guy who got to install the Internet at a small business who wanted it to be done on a Solaris workstation. That was a fun challenge... Other installs were Trumpet Winsock. The ISP itself ran a custom linux app, you dialed in and landed on a text app or maybe it was Lynx? can't quite remember, it's been 30 years...
my fav real world engineering story is of the first commercial ISP in Hungary
my dude i cannot tell you how much i love these stories of non-faang, real world engineering for extreme reliability.
thank you for posting that.