I do remember this not-quite-internet at university in the 90s. Telnet was "spad" and FTP was "hhcp". If you wanted to connect to a real FTP server, you had to send hhcp requests to "ft-relay" and the FTP hostname was the first folder name under the root.
Coloured book protocols (X.25 based networking) existed at some UK universities as late as 1997, it was still possible to use this network when I was an undergraduate in 1995, but the service was no longer available by the time I graduated.
Here is a link to a site describing a system that you could use (probably considerably earlier than 1997) to access the Internet (in this case an FTP server) despite only yourself having X.25, via hhcp:
