Man, I've been using the internet since 1994. Back then I started with CompuServe. Think like AOL but more beige. It had an instant messaging system and email and a portal with various pages on different topics. But you could also use a browser, like Mosaic or Netscape, to browse the internet. I used Alta Vista and Excite and Yahoo as search engines. There were also personal website that people wrote in basic HTML and hosted on Geocities and communities on specific topics would create webrings to link these sites together. We also used apps like Gopher and Usenet Newsgroups.

And before that it was BBS, bulletin board services, which were computers managed by strangers and you would just call them with your phone line modem using a terminal software and their system would pick up and establish a connection if it was available. You could access messages, emails, upload or download files, and some have you access to the internet if you were lucky.