Forgot to respond to this one. psychonaut got it on Fidonet. Usenet was a system that ran over UUCP (which was originally developed for file copying and then evolved to include email and Usenet newsgroups). Anyone could likewise start up a UUCP server, arrange with a nearby site for connection, and start networking. That there’s the rub. If you’re sending too much traffic thru your connection, they might not want to continue the free ride. Sites were more willing to allow a connection to universities and such rather than just random people.
While UUCP started on Unix machines, it quickly spread to other OSes. With the DEC OSes of the day being the earliest ports. So the “Unix” part pf UUCP was outdated very early on.
Note: Just because you were dialing up something, exchanging email or reading newsgroups doesn’t mean your were on THE Internet (or ARPANET/NSFNET as it were). Anybody could dial up something and do stuff online.
I was using dialup before there was an ARPANET so I was certainly not on the Internet!
Regarding usefulness (esp. circa 1990 per the OP): It was fantastically useful! Even mere email was a big help to me starting years earlier. By 1990 the main FTP archives* are going strong so there was a lot of downloadable content. The search program Archie which came out that year made looking for stuff a lot easier. (And was followed by Veronica and Jughead of course.) WAIS was another protocol for searching online databases. Which ended up focused mainly on Gopher sites. I never found Gopher all that useful to me. But others apparently did.
Later when the World Wide Web hit, the content out there was almost exclusively FTP/Gopher/etc. It took a bit for the default presumption that a URL starts with “http” to arise. So I was using Lynx (!) early on to browse the web as a nice interface for visiting the usual sites. (I still install Lynx on my machines to that I can do basic Internet stuff even when the GUI isn’t running/can’t run. Which occasionally leads to a bootstrap problem: downloading Lynx when you don’t have it and the machine is crufted up.)
I’ll also add that the Internet started as an American thing. It started as an American military and university thing, and then, because American, it spread to big business & the rest of us.
But it was more difficult and took longer in the rest of the world. The AARNET refered to above /did not permit/ private or business connections. Some universities were less restrictive than others, but the internet only became available generally in Australia when the gateway at Melbouren University started permitting general connections.
In 1991 I was only able to get an unauthorised connection by knowing someone. Also a small number of dodgy Comp Sci students ran unauthorised gateways, the military, and a small number of (mostly defence) companies used international dial-up phone connections to connect to American gateways.
I played netrek a fair bit starting in 1989, interactive multiplayer real time internet gaming was around in the timeframe of the OP. It was at a university on a workstation, of course.
Oh, this was hardwired ethernet, not via modem. Modems were too slow for that sort of thing.
I was poking around the web with NCSA Mosaic before Netscape came out, but my advice to 1994 Shagnasty would be that Usenet was the much more efficient place to look for nude photos to download, provided your news server subscribed to the right newsgroups.
Gamesdomain was a pretty good site in the mid-1990s as I recall. I used the Travelocity website in the late 1990s(starting in 1997 or so?) but I basically used it as a search engine to know what specifically to ask a travel agent for and how much I should expect to pay there.
In 1989 I was working on a game show and tasked with assessing whether we should sign up to an online service for research. The choices I came up with were AOL, CompuServe, and Lexis/Nexis. Lexis was the most useful, and for me the internet was a collection of amazing but separate universes, sort of like different libraries. Email, even internal email, came around 1993, at the same time as the Web exploded.
ARPANET/etc. definitely had businesses on it. Several military contractors and companies that provided the ARPANET infrastructure in particular. The major player in the latter category was BBN.
I had hired a programmer to purchase me a computer ( 486) and set it up. I know she was using my computer to go online about 1988 but I never got on until about 1993 or 1994.
As a point of reference, as a first year comp sci student in 1990 I was given an email account and internet access. This was an Australian university. We had accounts on a unix system that was internet connected (SunOS I think).
I got into playing MUDS at the time, but due to bandwidth costs they didn’t like you logging into overseas machines with telnet to play muds, so the sysadmins would kill your session and lock your account if you did it too many times. Eventually I got access through the student union computers (mac plus, the all in one with the tiny mono screens if I remember) and I was able to play MUDs in peace.
Damn I just checked and realised the original 128k mac is 32 years old… Now I feel old ;(
Commercial access in Australia was a little fraught in the early days. There were plenty of companies that realised how valuable it would be to gain access, and there was a lot of semi-legal stuff going on until a proper handle of the problem was managed. The big problems were that AARNet was owned by the universities - but it didn’t own infrastructure - but rather leased connectivity from the major telcos. Commercial operations were both illegal (as AARNet was not a licensed carrier) and a breach of contract with the telcos. Access involving joint research was a good way of dressing up things. Some universities were more ready to deal with such ideas than others.
The problem was that the telcos were asleep and had no idea what this Internet thing was, and there was basically nobody other than the universities that could provide access. This changed rapidly as the 90’s took off. Nowadays AARNet actually is a carrier, and in some places does own significant infrastructure. But it still doesn’t provide commercial access.
In a previous life I spent quite a bit of time trying to negotiate high bandwidth links for supercomputer interlinking between various university supercomputer facilities. It probably helped me attain my current smooth scalped coiffure. (Some of the money that vanished into the pockets of telcos for essentially nothing was deeply worrying) But I helped bring about some big wins too. So it wasn’t all bad.
There’s a scene in the 1983 movie WarGames where Matthew Broderick’s character dials into an airline’s server and makes reservations for a flight to Paris. His character would readily nitpick: first, that’s not the Internet; and second, he didn’t buy tickets but only made a reservation. If the real-life people on whom Broderick’s character was based kept up with the technology, they could easily have been in Shagnasty’s cohort of early adopters.
Lynx is in fact the best option for me to browse this message board when I’m at a work computer. Without the ability to install tracker- and ad-blockers on company equipment, I’d quickly get tired of the hovering ad at the bottom of the screen.
I got my first email address in college in the late '80s. Around 1990, we were first allowed to send and receive email beyond the university campus.
I also discovered Usenet about that time. However, you were blocked from posting unless you filled out a form (and got it co-signed by a professor) justifying why you felt it necessary to be able to post. (The university was still getting used to the internet, and didn’t want anything posted online that might discredit the university.)
I maintained Internet access for a couple of years after graduation by dialing my university server from across the country (which was an expensive long-distance call), before they finally got around to canceling my account around 1994.
I then signed up for a commercial dial-up service.