Comment by munksbeer

This is me too. First access to the internet was through a dial-up to a "bulletin board" (via a girlfriend's fathers account). From there you could launch a shell and get (I will get things wrong here) lynx, gopher, usenet, telnet (muds), etc.

Then I went to university and we got access to the internet directly there, but in the country I grew up in, it was pretty much only university students on IRC etc at the the time. Within a couple of years the commercial providers sprung up and "everything went downhill" (the sentiment being expressed here).