It just depends on how much patience you have. In the 80s I could connect with a 9600 baud modem, which probably had an effective rate about half of that. I did connect in the late 80s just to see what it was about, and at that time it wasn’t about much. Just 2 or 3 years later I was connecting with an 18Kb modem, getting that rate, and it was working pretty well.
The earliest I can remember accessing the Internet was via AOL in 1996. I can clearly remember being absolutely amazed that you could view porn for free. I had a 486 computer and a 9.6k modem. A simple .jpg image would take 4 or 5 minutes to download and you would get the top of the picture and it would slowly fill in. Of course there was no thumbnails so it was a crapshoot as to what you might see. But Wow! There were boobies out there on that Internet thing!
Thinking back, life was good and God I was a little pervert back then.
I re ever the day I upgraded to a 14.4k modem. That same day I upgraded to 8mb of ram. The 4mb of ram cost me $85!
We got (dial-up) modem interenet access probably around 1994-1995. I would have been 13 or so, but I remember being the one pushing it at least at first.
We had had Prodigy probably a year or two earlier, but this was basically a BBS service with a very early-90s looking front-end.
I do remember trying to sell my parents on why we needed a proper internet provider. ("But what do you do on the internet?) Thankfully, my dad’s firm decided they all needed to get email addresses to be current. Truth be told, at the time, I wanted an internet connection to see blocky, pixellated naked ladies.
…though I guess this whole internet thing did end up doing other useful things. 
May I tack on a related question?
When was the first time you looked at porn online?
I’m curious to know how that developed.
Early 90s with alt.binaries.pictures.blahblahblah…
What was that called?
We’ve come a long way, baby.
And you had to run a conversion program of some sort. The downloaded information was in ASCII and it needed to be decrypted before the picture was revealed.
Oh man,
We had a legendary floppy disk that got passed around all our friends. It had probably 20-30 pixellated, terrible jpegs of porn images downloaded from some seedy BBS. That would have been 1994 or so, though I suspect said BBS images went back to the late 80s.
By 1995, once I had proper internet - well, I was an adolescent boy, so fill in the blanks. There were plenty of lousy jpegs floating about on the internet and usenet by then, and I was thrilled to have them.