Got my first email account as part of my freshman stuff in college, and started reading Usenet news feeds and using Gopher shortly thereafter. Used my first actual browser (NCSA Mosaic) in 1993.
From about 1989 or so, I had a modem and would connect to various BBSes, and one of them might have had a SMTP gateway or something, but for the most part, it was local content.
1983 or 84, at college where we could connect to machines off campus. My first job in 1985 I had an admin account on decvax, so I was solidly online at that point.
I communicated on BBS’s in the mid-late 80’s… let’s say 1988 or thereabouts. I first used “the internet” in 1992 when I got an email/Usenet account in college.
