“What internet service did you have in 1990?”
Arpanet and usenet, and I was signed up for three bbs services for news and fractal graphics. Usenet started in 1979 and was pretty widely used by 1980. BBS systems were running by ‘76 or ‘78 or so and most were specialized (BBS has been discussed as an alternate to WWW should the governments crack down on Web discussion).
These were all text-based dialup services with modems (remember modems? lol)unless you were at a place tied to Arpanet trunks. Later in the ‘80s you could telnet in.
You are correct that the graphics-heavy WWW was not there, nor were specific “browsers” but you could telnet in or dial in to a server.
Way back then, people could coordinate meteor shower falls or bolide falls using usenet, and could aggregate news stories from many sources, especially if many people were interested in a given topic and would feed info to the nets. It was a lot like Free Republic, groups of people with a common interest could form a group and share data pretty much globally if you could get something like a TTY43 terminal.
While I used Arpanet mostly for data transfers and geeky stuff, there was quite a lot of “news” and discussion.
So if people noticed fish kills and bird falls and posted the news, you could gain a perspective over a wide geo area and time span.
I had a coal-fired computer, the steam pipes got really hot. I programmed in Onetran.
I think you know my point though. Less than 100,000 people world wide would have had the set up you would have had.
These stories of bird deaths are read by millions today. The information is in the hands of casual browsers and users.
This is a sea change to how information is dispersed. 20 years ago, you had to know what you were looking for, now you just stumble across tons of unrelated news.