I was using Prodigy to follow the Persian Gulf War in ‘90-’91. Clunky, slow, but the basics of the internet were all there.
I was on Compuserve and used their boards. Since we had to pay for the long distance call some idiots would waste hundreds a month in “chat” rooms.
I just used the bulletin boards that were very similar to FR. To save money I’d log in, download the messages to me and a few topics then log off. You could respond offline. Then log back in, load your responses, and get back off.
Then they started giving us about 30 free minutes a month so that kept me from wasting money.
And, of course, it eventually became unlimited usage for one price. But by that time Yahoo had come out and made a lot of the features on Compuserve redundant (AOL also).
I remember the first time I bought a 2400 baud rate modem for $170. I thought I was on the cutting edge! lol