In the late 80s my brother brought me a 300 baud modem and got me signed up with Compuserve. At that time you only received 3 hours a month and then were charged after that. If you only used it for mail this was fine. The world wide web did not exist and everything was text based. However you could download gif files to view a picture on the computer. This usually took an hour to download.
The next modem he brought me was a 900 baud modem , then a 14.4. When he got a 28.8 we thought we were living!!!
Locally there were bulletin boards that you could log in and download files. Some of the computer stores hosted them as well as private citizens. They have pretty much disappeared now. The Dayton Public Library and Wright State had remote access through telnet. Dayton also had something known as Freenet. As far as I know it no longer exists as well.
When the WWW came into being, Compuserve branched out with WOW which gave unlimited access for 19.99 a month. This company lasted about a year. AOL and Compuserve merged and it was time to change to AOL which also offered unlimited plans. My address was Jfry43@aol.com I was 43 at the time. I really can't remember what my Compuserve address and WOW addresses were at the time. Compuserve originally assigned numeric addresses.
I kept the AOL account until about 2003 when we acquired high speed internet. They gave me about 6 months free and then wanted to charge me to have two accounts so I canceled AOL.The first web browser I used was Mosaic. Then Netscape came out and was real big until Explorer was released. There are advantages to both. Now Firefox is one of my favorite browsers.
