Waaaay back when Ebay was young, you could leave feedback for anyone at random. One particular individual took this to genius levels. I’ve kept this bookmarked for nearly 18 years.
You have to read them directly, as me quoting them will not do them justice.
So much confusion.
Arpanet started in 1969 or so. In 1974 we used it at Illinois to log into Stanford to use their paranoid person simulator, Parry. Usenet started in 1979, before the internet, using UUCP and mail servers. You used it on Unix systems with programs like rn, which let you subscribe to newsgroups. I know that in 1988 or 1989 there was one low volume alt.sex group, so you can see how primitive it was.
Email was sent specifying paths to the computer with the person you wanted to send mail to. There were a couple of backbone machines (decvax at DEC, ucbvax at Berkeley and ihnp4 at Bell Labs Naperville) which had the IP addresses of just about any machine you wanted to talk to. Business cards would read {ihnp4,decvax,ucbvax}!erc3ba!sd
Domain addressing, with Domain Name Servers started in 1984. (Cite) The internet quickly went downhill from there because the spammers could use it.
The first spam ever was from a lawyer (natch) advertising immigration services. I think I got a copy.
Before Netscape there was Mosaic. You used a local ISP in the early '90s to get on to the internet. We went to the card catalogs of a number of university libraries. 1200 baud modems were quite slow indeed.
AOL, Compuserve and the like were not the internet originally, since you used the software on the disks they flooded the world with to log into their private servers, and initially could send email to other users only.
Many of the fun things on the Internet did not start on the Internet. PLATO, which I used in 1974 - 1977, had message boards, text messaging, MUDs, multiplayer interactive games, email, and a newspaper. (I wrote a Star Trek column.) It ran on a couple of Cyber 7600s, and had terminals around the world.
When BBN was working in IMPs - computers that were nodes - they used Lockheed SUE minicomputers. (Everyone made minis in those days.) It was microprogrammable, and we had one in our lab for research. I wrote a simulator for it, and this got sent off to BBN. I don’t know if they ever used it, but if they did I can claim at least a small part in creating the internet.
You may joke, but I connected an Etch-A-Sketch to two stepper motors and a microcontroller. There might be a way to put it on the 'net, somehow.
If someone hasn’t done so already.
In 1985 Victoria Australia we had a net connection but it wasn’t ‘The’ internet. By connecting our rotary telephone receiver to a receptacle holder we could ‘dial’ in to a government network and research statistics on-line. Dad was in the judiciary. But you couldn’t do that and use the phone at the same time, it was one or the other. The real internet was yet to come but when it did come it was still a phone or net proposition in the early days.
Started using email on ARPANET in 1977. Remember being listed in the actual book of people on it that had names, addresses, email addresses.
Was using Model 33 TTYs and dialup to access a 360 in the late 60s.
ARPANET was highly controlled in terms of who/what could use it. So to communicate with many fellow CS folk, we had to use UUCP. The maps, the routes, the time delays, etc. were horrible by today’s standards but a miracle back then.
NSFNET came along in 1985 and a lot more people got Internet-like access. Networks started to link together. But you still had to route email between networks.
FTP sites were important. You put files on an FTP server for others to download. For PC software, Simtel was a major resource. Archie was the first “Internet search” program that scrubbed FTP sites so you could find things easier.
IMDb started out as a list of USENET postings and later search software to find what you needed. It later became an mail-query service. You sent an email with a formatted query to it’s server and you got an email reply with the result.
There were several such email-oriented DB servers around.
I wasn’t around for the ARPANET / 300 baud / !bangpaths stuff. My first exposure to the internet was in 1991. “Internet” meant:
• being able to send emails to people other than those at your own school; it was one of two major networks at the time — the other being BITNET. Practically everyone supplying their contact information would provide both —
Allan Hunter
<ahunter@ccvm.sunysb.edu> {internet}
<ahunter@sbccvm> {bitnet}
For comparison purposes, think “Facebook” and “Myspace” 
• Communities! I was a subscriber to the Info-Mac Digest. I’d go upstaird to the computer lab, sit at one of the terminals and log into the mainframe and retrieve my email, and there would be an issue of the Info-Mac Digest to read. Mac users would ask each other questions and answer those they knew the answer to, comment on new products, and so on… and
• FTP! … in addition to the informational and chatty posts, there was always a slew of freeware and shareware listings, all of which had been uploaded to the Info-Mac Archives and could be downloaded. You used an FTP client, such as Fetch. It meant my computer rapidly became customized, populated with applications and interface modifiers and capability-extenders of various sorts.
• The early web. I’d been using the internet for quite a while before I first encountered web browsers and web pages. There was one Mac in the computer lab amongst all the terminals, and it had Mosaic on it. To go anywhere you needed to know a somewhere to go to to start with. (There weren’t really any well-known search engines yet). Libraries were good because they would have an index page with links to interesting and new things. The phrase “surf the internet” arose because the way web browsers were used was that you landed somewhere to start with and you followed links to new pages, then on those pages you’d follow links to yet more pages. It was an adventure — you didn’t choose a destination and go directly to it, because for the most part you didn’t know what was out there or have a way to search for what you wanted — you probably knew a dozen or so starting pages that you’d memorized and you went exploring.
There were no videos or images. Web pages contained TEXT. Links were always blue until you had clicked them and been to that address, then they changed to purple.
• Emailing file attachments. You couldn’t just attach a binary file, like a photo or a Word document, by dragging it into your email window or clicking a paper clip icon. That all came later. First of all, email did very undependable things to binary data, so you had to encode it as a text file. Mac users used a format called BinHex. PC users and Unix users utilized something called UUEncode. The binary file would be converted into text strings that were compliant with ASCII (which was sort of the predecessor to UniCode). Then you would insert that into the body of your email message. The person at the other end would save the email message body as a text file and run their decoder on it to convert it back to binary.
I remember my adventures with PLATO fondly, starting in 1979. Debating about Tolkien, discussing medicine with people from around the globe, making snide comments about other people’s ignorance.
In other words, what I do online hasn’t changed much in 38 years. 
Note that “the early days of the internet” is not a very precise question. As you see from the answers so far it can be interpreted as anything from the 1970s to the 1990s, which were vastly different decades as far as internet development went.
My first real meeting with the net was starting uni in 1994. That was one of the last years the Norwegian University of Science and Technology didn’t include anything about the net in the introductory computer courses. I had elementary spreadsheet, wordprocessor and programming stuff, but nothing about networked computers.
The student organisations offered an internet course though, covering, as far as I recollect: usenet, worldwide web, ftp, gopher and archie.
Two years later the uni introduction course included html and java.
This is a pretty funny (to me, anyway) story that I like to tell:
When I was in 7th grade I ran a BBS that was pretty popular. This was in 1993 or so and I decided I wanted to offer free internet e-mail to my users. E-mail wasn’t really available to the public at this time and only those at universities seemed to use it. So I signed up with a company called UUNET to handle the transactions and every night my computer would dial their long-distance number and upload any sent messages and download any received messages for the users.
This service lasted until my parents got the phone bill after the first month. At the time, I was really naive about people’s desire for porn. Did you know there were services back then that would send pornography through e-mail in plaintext code (UUENCODE/DECODE)? So a picture would be split up into tens of e-mails, the user would copy and paste the contents into a text file and run it through the decoder that would produce a .gif. Anyway, during this month of e-mail service, my computer spent probably half the day connected to UUNET sending/receiving e-mail and it being a long-distance call, the bill after the month was around $800 or so. My parents quickly shut that shit down.
I used to hang on green screen BBSs that you’d dial into with a modem. They were a little like this, but much more primative.
There wasn’t an easy way to search the internet. There were some data services (Lexis/Nexus) that you could access from a University library, but they were pretty difficult to use.
We used to type memos and send paper around the office in inter office envelopes, and then file in in huge filing cabinets. When we first got email, it was strictly inter company - you couldn’t send it to anyone outside the company - computers really didn’t talk to each other that way yet in corporate America. Fairly quickly, Corporate America got their ip addresses assigned and their domains set up and then you could start communicating with the world.
Personal computers didn’t have an IP stack on them by default, so if you wanted to connect to the internet for real, instead of through a functional terminal, you needed to load one up. To do so, you had to be comfortable in what one of my young techs called “the dark place” - DOS. (unless you were into Unix in which case none of this applies because you were probably on usenet long ago.)
Popular home terminals like Prodigy and AOL came along to aggregate services - like BBSs, simple research (encyclopedia level), and travel arrangements, but not much shopping.
Then the web hit. IP stacks were built in. Most people still used dial up at home, but they didn’t need the intermediary, they could just start at the web through Netscape Navigator. Amazon hit, and shopping opened up. And that is about the time the modern internet you know and love started.
When Yahoo began in 1995, the internet was small enough that a phone book could contain it all.
Yahoo was originally run by human librarians who created a hand-made list of interesting web sites, organized by category.
You could pick a category, such as “recipes”, then a sub category such as “soups” then a subcategory such as “chicken”–and you would find a recipe for chicken soup!!! And even better, sometimes there would be 3 or 4 different recipes in the same category!!! It was wonderful, and almost unbelievable!!!
We connected to the internet at work sometime in 1992. A year later, after using Gopher and FTP, I remember downloading the first web browser from the U of Illinois. Mosaic reminded me of a Mac program called Guide from Owl Ltd. that I had used in the mid-80s.
Before that, I went through a series of dialup systems using modems starting with a 300 baud acoustic one in a walnut box - made for an office desk. My roommates and I had dialup access starting in the late 70s using a Teletype KSR-33. We really wanted a CRT but they were expensive - one of the companies we dialed into had a project to build a cheap CRT terminal but the engineer, a student named Steve Wozniak, found a more interesting project to work on…
Let’s see–bought my first WinTel box in college in 1992. A 486 with 4 MB of RAM and a 170 MB HD. At the time my school’s computer lab was a room full of floppy only 8088 plus three 286es with 1 MB of RAM and 40 MB HDs. None of the student accessible computers belonging to the school had any type of local or remote networking, and I doubt many of the instructors that did have a computer in their office had a modem (some instructors still used various Apple II models.) Modems weren’t standard equipment on computers at the time, and when I added one (at a blazing 0.014 megabit per second) I would guess it made me one of less than a dozen people–student or teacher–that had a computer and modem on campus.
I used the modem on my computer to connect with local-call bulletin boards, using those for downloading shareware stored on the BBS servers, the local chat rooms, and Fidonet. That was the pattern for the first couple-three years. Then Microsoft started something called the Windows 95 Preview Program, where you could sign up to receive a beta version of Win95 (but not be in the “real” beta tester program, constantly getting new builds), which also included free unlimited access to the also beta Microsoft Network. It was basically a (not excessively) more fancy version of a BBS that didn’t even access content outside their own servers at first, but eventually added Usenet newsgroups. (I don’t even remember if they had web access.)
After Win95 went live, the MSN started charging, and obscenely, so I moved to my first ISP. This was also structured like a BBS, but also had an “internet portal.” To use this, you had to download and configure 1 or 2 special drivers (that weren’t built into Windows) before you could make use of TCP/IP, then dial up the ISP and choose the “internet portal” area of their service. From there, I would use early browers (including Netscape Navigator) along with FTP, Usenet newsreaders, and IRC. It wasn’t until 2003 that I got away from dial-up and got a cable modem. (The speeds available at the time were 256 kbs, 768 kbs, and 1.5 mbs. I started off with 768 kbs but quickly upgraded to 1.5 mbs. Ever since then, the provider has been periodically bumping up their bandwidth options, and now has a starting speed of 60 mbs and a premium speed of 100 mbs.)
Which still happens on well behaved sites for me today. It’s a browser setting that some sites, unfortunately, do not obey.
Oh, UUENCODE. Fun and nightmares rolled into one.
I had used Lynx (text based browser) before I used Mosaic. Once I saw Mosiac, it all changed. I felt like I was in a Gibson novel.
I watched the development of the Internet from an interesting perspective. My job at the time was designing networks for large corporations. They all had networks that linked their offices and sites together so their employees could access computer systems. They didn’t use the telephone network and a dialup modems between big offices, they had dedicated links called private leased circuits. In the 1980s these were typically 64kbps to 2Mbs. If you paid a big Telco enough money you could get a link between two sites on either side of the world. The links were connected to routers and then to local area networks. These private networks were known as Intranets.
They used a IP - Internet Protocol, a bit, but big corporations preferred to use whatever their computer suppliers were selling to get computers to talk to each other. The networks were awash with traffic like Appletalk, Decnet, Novell IPX, IBM SNA and many other protocols. IP tended to be used by the academics in research facilities - the beards and sandals - but it was also used by me to connect to the switches and routers.
On a personal basis I used dialup modems to access bulletin boards. They ran discussion boards like this, in glorious 80 x 25 character terminal mode - no graphic user interfaces then. However, that is how computing was back then, everything was in a green text screen. Windows only really got going around 1990.
The bulletin board system I used in the UK was called CIX, its user base were all geeky guys, I believe it may even be still alive to this day. The system ran on a Unix computer with a big rack of modems connected and subscribers would dial in and discuss technology and ways of making the system better. The BBS was connected to other BBS in the Fido dialup network and the computers would all exchange postings and email. AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy and others did the same on a much larger scale. As this became more popular Microsoft joined the party with MSN. This was all using a text based interface. The BBS by this time were a bit more refined, you could upload and download files and images. The bigger companies expanded their user base by sending out huge numbers of CDs on the front of magazines or making them available in stores. You installed the software and paid monthly for a subscription.
One day, there was an announcement on the BBS about an Internet gateway becoming available. What was this? Apparently, it helped connect to university networks, but you could do a lot more if you configured you PC to speak IP and become another machine on this network. There was some discussion about starting up a rival system to bulletin boards just selling Internet access - an Internet Service provider. The guys who were used to handling computers with lots of modems switched to selling internet subscriptions.
I showed my colleagues this in around 1992 and they were not so impressed. You could search using a program called Gopher and there were a discussion boards and you could download files. However, in the corporate world, the main development was integrating the many and varied forms of email. That changed when Tim Berners Lee came along with HTML and a HTTP web servers and a Web browser. That is when the whole idea started to get traction. The graphical interface, with colours and pictures, appealed to marketing people, soon after there were the first Internet cafes. The big BBS companies switched to become ISPs and just about every telecom company jumped on the bandwagon.
I don’t think anyone really understood what they did at the time, but it was really to create a new public data network. Each computer on the network could send packets to any other computer, this was quite a different approach than everyone going through a central BBS computer. Moreover, the hyperlinking feature of HTML meant that you could hop from one server to another automatically - surfing. That made it usable.
Pretty soon there was a race to produce the best browser and webserver. Meanwhile the corporates wanted internet links to their intranets and they started installing web servers. ISPs proliferated and soon became a far bigger market for communications equipment than the corporates.
This flaky, unloved, protocol IP became very important and my job changed to making it work at scale. It was successively retrofitted with various features that improved the way it worked. However, its key feature was that it was free. No-one owned it and could demand royalties, it was Open Source. Without that, there would have been no Internet.
The growth of the Internet is quite easy to chart in terms of how many networks it supports each year. Its design limit is now seriously stretched.
I had been using BBS’s at home for several years but my defining moment learning about the Internet was in 1991. I was at work (I worked at a large Government research site-NASA and Navy) and needed to locate the TIFF standard. We all had desktop computers on a LAN that in turn was connected to the internet-though not many people were used to that yet. I knew I could call up the library and get the document via inter-library loan-that was what my boss expected me to do. But I got an idea and called a friend who was one of the onsite system administrators. I asked him if he could help. He said he didn’t have a copy himself but he would try to help. A few minutes later he called back and asked me the name of the closest printer to my desk. Out came the TIFF standard. I was floored. I asked him how he had done that? I then learned about Gopher and Archie. At the next meeting of the staff I proudly informed everyone that a new world had arrived and everyone needed to jump on the bandwagon. 
They were kind and didn’t shut me down. In my defense-even in our medium to high tech world except for the computer folks many people didn’t have any personal experience with finding information on the internet at that time. A couple of years later I was involved in SGML publishing and heard about HTML and the web from the wrong end of the telescope…
ftp is still useful, even though most people don’t get it. My last project included automatically sftping to Taiwan to download scads of manufacturing data, and automatically writing sftp scripts (using expect) to get only new data.
There are some times when browser based file transfers don’t cut it.
I can’t believe this is being talked about like it is such ancient history. Good Lord.
Well, lemme grab my Geritol and put down my walker…I don’t know if I can remember waaaaaay back to the mid-90s…
My first foray into the Internet was early Ebay around 1997-98. I used to be a member of an art-related message board that had no separate forums or topics, it was all one long running thread, just plain black and white, no images.
Half the internet was porn, probably just like today, with another good portion being pictures of cats.
Oh, and my computer took up a helluva lot more space, as in my entire dining room table that seats 6 comfortably.
And as far as The Straight Dope, I was still reading the books back then.
In the 90s, everything was dialup. Which was fine if your ISP was in your city, but non-urban customers had to pay long distance toll charges to get on, even to their freenet. Around 1995, Florida enacted a law requiring phone companies to offer a flat rate for calls to ISP providers. So, to my freenet in Tallahassee, I could dial up and stay on line unlimited for a dialup charge of 25c. Freenets usually had a 60 minute limit per connection, but for a quarter, I could dial up Tallahassee once a day and stay on line for an hour.
Yes, you are right about this. We didn’t have any notion then that we would be on the Internet for hours and hours a day and that we would have these little pocket size computers we carry around everywhere. Wifi wasn’t something I had any awareness of. It was something you had to pay for by the hour, so you got on and diddled around for a bit and got off and went about your life. In my family we felt bad for being on too long…“God, I was on the Internet for 45 minutes!” Many workplaces didn’t do much digitally and/or online, so it was sort of seen as a time waster. Much like now, I guess.