1. Relatively few people were on the internet before midway through the 90's. BBS's were probably of greater interest in the early 90's. If you had a specific interest, there might just nothing online about it yet.
2. Dial-up sucked. It was slow, not terribly reliable, and it monopolized your phone-line. Many can probably remember dialing into their university and hanging up 10 times until they finally got a faster modem on the other end. (You could tell how fast a modem was by its handshaking sounds.) A lot of people first experienced the internet on university dialup, because home service wasn't there yet or was really expensive.
3. The late-90's internet was sometimes very difficult to navigate. Search engines generally sucked. Even if you had their inflexible syntax correct and had perfect search terms, their indexing was often just not up to the task.
4. Protocols were heavily balkanized. HTML and WWW were not yet dominant. There were other things too, like gopher. Gopher had it's own search engines... that sucked.
5. People actually used usenet to have discussions. Usenet really was better in the late 90's. There were enough people using it that you could learn some really interesting stuff, but it hadn't been rendered unusable by bots, spam, and copyright trolls yet. It was like reddit, but way geekier and far less comprehensive.
6. Chatting with people in real-time was a thing. Imagine discord, but text-only. You guessed it, that was it's own protocol :IRC.
7. In general, everything was splintered and needed it's own programs. You could talk to other people in a dozen different ways, and they all had their own protocols and programs. Nothing was truly dominant. Many here can probably still remember their ICQ number.
8. A lot of the awesome stuff we take for granted now just wasn't there back then. Wikipedia was not a thing. If you wanted info on anything local like restaurants, etc., you could just forget about it. Multimedia was rudimentary as heck because even just adding one 60 kilobyte image to your site would add half a minute to the load time for users on a relatively fast modem, and much more for those that weren't. Text was king!
9. Malicious code was truly hazardous back then. Browsers of the day were like natives of the Americas before smallpox arrived. They had no immunity at all. By the late 90's you could really F' up royally if you weren't careful.
Every now and then as I find a piece of scarce, non-trivial information on the net in a minute or 5, I stop to think about how long that would have taken 30 years ago.
If I did have some appropriate physical reference books to look in, it might still take 15 minutes to an hour. But if not, I'd have to travel to a library (weather permitting) while/if it was open, find the appropriate section of books, read through the index or chapter titles, etc. and scan - in hopes the answer was there.
Today, in some spheres (except e.g. those where the answers are still hidden) I'm much -much- freer to ask many more questions and deep-dive into subjects that, back then, I could only dream of learning about. Yes, I could read a book, if I knew the book existed. And where to order it from. And wait for it to arrive in 2 to 6 weeks.
If only I'd had this 30 years ago. Hell, I imagine, what if I'd had this power as a child in a small town.
1. Relatively few people were on the internet before midway through the 90's. BBS's were probably of greater interest in the early 90's. If you had a specific interest, there might just nothing online about it yet.
2. Dial-up sucked. It was slow, not terribly reliable, and it monopolized your phone-line. Many can probably remember dialing into their university and hanging up 10 times until they finally got a faster modem on the other end. (You could tell how fast a modem was by its handshaking sounds.) A lot of people first experienced the internet on university dialup, because home service wasn't there yet or was really expensive.
3. The late-90's internet was sometimes very difficult to navigate. Search engines generally sucked. Even if you had their inflexible syntax correct and had perfect search terms, their indexing was often just not up to the task.
4. Protocols were heavily balkanized. HTML and WWW were not yet dominant. There were other things too, like gopher. Gopher had it's own search engines... that sucked.
5. People actually used usenet to have discussions. Usenet really was better in the late 90's. There were enough people using it that you could learn some really interesting stuff, but it hadn't been rendered unusable by bots, spam, and copyright trolls yet. It was like reddit, but way geekier and far less comprehensive.
6. Chatting with people in real-time was a thing. Imagine discord, but text-only. You guessed it, that was it's own protocol :IRC.
7. In general, everything was splintered and needed it's own programs. You could talk to other people in a dozen different ways, and they all had their own protocols and programs. Nothing was truly dominant. Many here can probably still remember their ICQ number.
8. A lot of the awesome stuff we take for granted now just wasn't there back then. Wikipedia was not a thing. If you wanted info on anything local like restaurants, etc., you could just forget about it. Multimedia was rudimentary as heck because even just adding one 60 kilobyte image to your site would add half a minute to the load time for users on a relatively fast modem, and much more for those that weren't. Text was king!
9. Malicious code was truly hazardous back then. Browsers of the day were like natives of the Americas before smallpox arrived. They had no immunity at all. By the late 90's you could really F' up royally if you weren't careful.