Direct Connect really excelled at college campuses. All the traffic was internal so it was blazingly fast plus the hub had a chat feature which is incredibly useful (pre-reddit) and sometimes people would share old tests and stuff.
We had a BulletinBoard based community with FTP sharing, and someone built a crawler to index the servers. So everyone just knew this staic IP which was out campus version of Google.
We then slowly transitioned into DC++ by constantly educating and sharing content on both FTP and DC++
The real shame was that move to DC++ actually caused the BulletinBoard community to die slowly. No more announcement posts, no more requests, no more SuperStar uploaders who “magically” found the latest TV shows aired in the US.
Public school? Probably not. Tech school? Absolutely.
The RIT DC hub was the shit back in the day....
Back in the day there was nothing underground about it, at least for CS students. :) Connecting to the DC hub was a right of passage. So I am speaking from experience. :)