I was just thinking about the early days of the Internet, when ISDN was too expensive, and DSL wasn't quite available yet.    I had my home network setup with a HUB (lol) and a Linux box as my gateway with dial on demand setup so anytime anything wanted to use the Internet it would auto-dial and connect to Sonic of course. lol.    No WiFi, it just wasn't around yet.  I wouldn't see DSL for another 3 years after that.    Oh and this is in no means my earliest use of the Internet.

When I first connected to the internet it was through the Library, They had some sort of Unix system that would allow you to log in to an account without a password, you would be forced into a limited menu system, it had gopher and Archie if I recall correctly.  Quickly learned that ctrl-z was not disabled, and you could drop in to a shell and use tools like ftp and telnet.  Man that was awesome, I abused that system for a long time until the library finally figured out people were using it. lol.

Probably around 1991 or so, Eventually I signed up for CRL Networks.  They offered dial-up shell for a set amount a month (I forget how much).    But it was amazing, because around 1992 I downloaded my first ever Linux distro through that system.

CRL didn't want to run a web server, it was too new, and they felt gopher was the future of the internet, so I had a gopher site, eventually we learned we could host web pages via ftp. So I had a ftp://ftp.crl.net/~whatever (I can't remember my username) as my first website. People complained about not having a proper http service, and eventually CRL caved in and bought a license for whatever http server they used (I think it was whatever NetScape was offering up.) , and we all switched over.

Eventually I met Dane the CEO of Sonic.net, and went to join Sonic, but there was a waiting list. But once I got on there, I used TIA (The Internet Adapter) via the shell server to get a GUI connection to the net.  Eventually, I started my own business and ran it for about 5 years, giving internet access to the San Joaquin area. Things just got faster and faster as time moved on, but to think about those early days sure does humble ya.