Ha, I remember that news item, although from the other end of the world, and not really sure where I read it. The gist was that the first email had been sent to Australia, and I do distinctly remember that Melbourne was the endpoint.
The University of Melbourne (munnari.oz) had a leased line to DEC’s Western Research Labs (decwrl) over which all of Australia’s traffic flowed. My systems connected to the Computer Science department’s machine, which had a link to munnari. Netnews was an overnight affair, and email slow. It was possible to remotely log in to an MIT system.
Unix distributions, on the other hand, arrived on 9-track tape via the “distribution tree”. You would get a copy, then make copies and send those on. Bug reports (at least in my experience) went back the same way. I found the TCP URGENT off-by-one bug in the BSD API, and tried to report it to my upstream; it came back “will not fix”, but it was unclear whether that was some gatekeeper between me and BSD.
... and had an EFnet server that could only run from 9pm to 5am or so because it'd otherwise cripple connectivity (even before DoS style stuff).