The trouble was that it was quite unclear to a researcher, even in one of the research council networking hubs, how to get access to the gateway, and it may have cost. I gave up trying before going to work in Oak Ridge for the summer (where I was taken aback by the primitive computing, at least "outside the fence"). For some time (mid-80s to early 90s? I don't remember) we were generally dependent on the infamous BITNET email gateway to communicate with the rest of the world from the well-developed UK network. It was "interesting" to deal with code in a Swedish 6-bit character set sent through the EBCDIC gateway to ISO 646-GB. (The Fortran Hollerith formats were added interest...)