Yeah by 2002 I think the web had mostly taken over. But I used Usenet in 2002 through Microsoft Outlook Express, a mail reader that was also a news client. No

Yeah by 2002 I think the web had mostly taken over. But I used Usenet in 2002 through Microsoft Outlook Express, a mail reader that was also a news client. Not a web browser. My e-mail was still through Outlook too, and my work e-mail at my first job was through Outlook. But in the mid 90's you would need a Windows 3.1 virtual machine to capture the online experience. All the PEOPLE I interacted with were actually on BBSes, which had ANSI graphics, which I used through MS-DOS. The web was a separate thing -- I switched into the Windows 3.1 GUI, which had fewer programs. And I probably downloaded Netscape Navigator over a really slow modem connection. Browsers didn't come with OSes! And then I would visit a web page -- there was a good site about guitars hosted at MIT. Maybe Yahoo or Alta Vista, and later eBay. For regular people, AOL or Prodigy was more popular than the web. The reason is that they were CURATED. I think they had professional writers and they had games portals and all that. Probably some stock quotes and news. You couldn't really play games on the web then, not until Java applets became popular. I'm pretty sure Java games and Flash games came much before JavaScript games. And AOL and Prodigy and Compuserve had e-mail. I think most regular people had AOL addresses. So it was kind of this walled garden, that they mostly kept you on, and the web was a separate thing. It was only around 2004 that Gmail and Maps and Facebook came out, and then the "open web" properties became dominant. Of course they repeated the playbook of AOL and tried to keep you on their site! The young companies always advertise themselves as open, and when they get users, they close down. So yeah I'd say the 90's was online, but for most people, the experience was mediated by some kind of "online service" like AOL/Prodigy/Compuserve. I had both -- my parents used AOL and I used the pretty much all the network-connected services I knew about.