I wonder if there's any publicly accessible archive of BIX from those days.
A lot of stuff didn't get archived nearly as much as one would hope.
In the early days, the available storage was "small", even compared to text. IIRC the default school disk allocation was "200 pages" (512words*36bits), or about 0.5MB. The mainframe's total disk capacity was something like 300MBytes, and that had to be shared by hundreds to thousands of users, mainframe disks were horribly expensive. Even when things were "backed up" to tape, it was common for those tapes to sit around until the equipment to read them was no longer available :-( (I've got a DECTape from High School, and several 9-track tapes from college. Sigh.)
There is a bunch of early ARPANet mailing-list mail that has just been lost, AFAIK. Google archives only go back to 1982, I think, when stuff started to be gatewayed to UseNet (most of it from Henry Spenser's "utzoo" site.) Sigh.
I guess I'm an example of the value of "real" universities. I have my BSEE and took more CS classes than average, and that's all swell and helpful. But I owe most of my career to the part-time job, its associated "other computer" account, and the rather unofficial access to ARPANet... I even got my first job after college via eMail. I might have been able to study all the same things, take the same finals and get the same grades, just from book learning. but I would not have had access to the array of **stuff** that was ultimately highly "formative." ("Dude! I was like THERE when they had to invent the email-list "digest" format!") (now, I'm not quite sure how to go FIND that stuff at a typical college...)