I actually got my first email address in 1989 when I was an EECS Freshman at Cal. Before that, I would interact with others via BBS’s. So yeah, I was using the Internet regularly in the early 90s, actually, and at the time it was lots of usenet, gopher, and ftp.
What a trip when Mosaic finally came out and brought along a graphical browser for data stored on the Web… In fact, it’s amazing how little innovation there’s been in how we interact with data online. It’s still HTTP silos with HTML either in static form or generated on the fly by processes collating the data based on cookies and stuff in their relational databases….
I think in 10 to 15 years our kids will laugh at our primitive our way of interacting with the Internet is… Ask a 15 year old kid on Facebook if she knows about Gopher, Finger, and Ping… Quite frankly she couldn’t give a shit… In 15 years, I figure URLs, IP addresses, and even the whole concept of HTML and databases will have been abstracted out… It’ll all be in the cloud. Sun didn’t execute well but their motto was dead on: The network *is* the computer.