NetNorth
Canada's branch of BITNET — the academic network that gave the country's universities email and mailing lists before the internet arrived.
As BITNET spread through American universities in the early 1980s, Canadian institutions built their own counterpart on the same technology: IBM mainframes passing files and messages along a chain of leased lines. NetNorth was Canadian in administration but technically part of the same network, so a student in Toronto could mail someone at Princeton or subscribe to a LISTSERV list without ever noticing the border. The European sibling was EARN.
Like the rest of the BITNET family, NetNorth was cheap, slow and far easier to join than ARPANET, which required defence connections. Once CA*net, Canada's national internet backbone, was built around 1990, TCP/IP took over and NetNorth faded away during the first half of the decade.