Early in my packet days, I recall there being packet nodes that would forward you through the internet to other places around the world. That didn't make sense to me, as part of the fun was to require very little infrastructure.
I wasn't involved in packet before the internet, but I was involved in amateur radio back then. From my view, the internet and mobile phones displaced a lot of general interest in this hobby.
This discussion brings back fond memories of watching the “slow scan TV” over packet radio ever so slowly rendering low res images of a family we used to talk to in the US from Australia on my dads rig with his 60ft antenna out the back. This was the early 1990s before the Internet was a thing. We ended up travelling to meet that family in Texas in 1994.
I recall in Texas there was some ham repeaters that patched you into the local phone network using DTMF, but can’t recall exactly what it was called. Phone calls in Australia at the time were costly so it was really a novelty.
SSTV was not packet actually. It was more of a semi-analog fax mode. It was used by news agencies at the time to send press photos and weather images across HF.
Packet was really multipoint packet switched like the internet using AX25 which was an adaptation of the X.25 protocol. Pretty similar to TCP/IP. You could even run TCP/IP over AX25 using various "NOS" programs. I used JNOS but most of the time I just used plain AX25 with SP.
I wasn't involved in packet before the internet, but I was involved in amateur radio back then. From my view, the internet and mobile phones displaced a lot of general interest in this hobby.