Sorry, I assumed you were around for the last century like many posters! I was on the Internet back in the early 1970s, using mini's in large facilities. Got on early PCs after the mid-1970s, and used early trial software to access the Internet via 300 BAUD modems. Think in terms of a character for each byte, and BAUD in terms of bits, commonly 8 bits per byte, so 300 BAUD is 300 bits per second (rough explanation). Took forever to download, painfully painting each character slowly from left to right.
I used CompuServe a lot to access forums and bulletin boards, in the late 1970s through the 1980s. That was one service, and quite popular. Friends of mine were admins. So yeah, lots of public internet long before the 1990s.
When the WWW came along I got criticized but trainers of computer education courses for disabling the graphics (I was used to quickly scanning the text content), because the teachers said a lot of work went into the graphics and they paid money to developers to fund the WWW. Well, I still block lots of pop-ups to this day!
That actually sounds like a smart idea.
And wow I didn’t know there was ANY internet that early.
300. It must have taken FOREVER to print something out.
i remember working in a graphics dept in the late 90s and the queue for all of us waiting for our print outs took FOREVER.
My first computer had 16MB storage!!!