In the early 90s the internet wasn't very well known. But when I got on, you'd dial in to a shell with a terminal emulator and it was all Usenet, FTP, Telnet, E

In the early 90s the internet wasn't very well known. But when I got on, you'd dial in to a shell with a terminal emulator and it was all Usenet, FTP, Telnet, Email, IRC, Gopher and this new WWW thing was being talked about. Usenet was probably the king of the net at that stage. When I first got on ( I actually did use usenet in the 80s at my dads work, but it wasn't till I could dial up from home did I engage with the internet), it was like discovering this secret world that virtually no one else knew about. I used FTP, Usenet and Gopher a lot to get information, and while its nothing compared today, in those days it was magic. Instead on being entirely reliant on books and magazines to give you information, you suddenly could start consuming a whole bunch of info for free. It's hard to describe how amazing that felt, it unlocked information for the information starved. The ability to download software was also amazing. I used to get magazines with disks on their covers with cool things to play with, but now, I could get LOTS of software. ( Also used BBS's for this ) IRC was in the early days when I first went on ( only a few hundred users at any given time on EFnet, the only network at the time) and I made friends all around the world ( including some of the very first IRC users ). At that stage, everyone was equally awed by how you could talk live with people all around the world. Also you got live updates on world events by people who were there. No waiting to hear about things on the news or in the newspaper. Amazing. Then within a few years, people started making some big money from the internet, and things quickly started to change, peaking with the dot.com boom and bust.