I remember when it was ARPANET. Later I recall seeing a Usenet feed through The Well sometime in the 80's when I was using GEnie and Compu$erve. In the very late 80's and early 90's as a returning student at UH I was granted access to the real thing (I soon had to become a fellow of the Future Studies Program and work on their MOO because they weren't handing out access to every student as they do now, ). Gopher and Veronica were the big things back then and the WWW was still text based for the most part with no browsers on PCs. Mosaic was cool in '93 followed by Cello, but if your site wasn't able to be read by Lynx (in text) you weren't being friendly.
In May of 1995 it got ugly. Life has never been the same since.