I used to play a half-dozen or so games of Diplomacy at time with daily turns for years.
There are still modern games that take advantage of this idea (my friends have been playing Old World like this recently) but I'd like to see it more.
It actually improved on the original by introducing new maps, which probably helped players unfamiliar with the original game who could probably draw the map from memory.
Games could often stall where a real-life didn't allow a player time to make their moves.
It was more of a mechanism to keep connections shorter because most BBSes only had a few phone lines, or even just one, so the number of simultaneous users was extremely limited.