It’s so enlightening to remember what one once didn’t know.

Around 1996 I was programming in BASIC and reading about that thing, “the internet” (I used it for the first time one year later). I was so confused by the apparent ability of e-mail to live in the ether: how come one could send mail to someone whose computer was off, then shut down their own computer, and the message would still arrive hours or days later when the recipient switched on their computer again? Where had that mail been lurking in the meantime??