The radio show Science Friday celebrated its anniversary a couple months ago now, and they replayed several pieces from shows in the past, including one about the Internet from 1993:
Science Friday Archives: Science Friday, 1993: The Future of the Internet It was pretty funny to listen to.
I grew up in a pretty small town with very limited access to computers. I was probably one of a handful of students in my school with a home computer, and one of 3 in my homeroom with a computer at home. In spring of 1995, we visited the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, and one of their exhibits at the time was a computer lab with access to the Internet. I think the first thing I looked for was an MTV website (we didn't have MTV where I grew up). When I moved down to Oregon that summer and started at the middle schools there, all of their schools had gotten wired over the summer and every student had Internet access. Intel has a very big presence in that town, and it is definitely felt in the school system. You had to take a special class to actually be able to use the computer, to show that you wouldn't get on and look up porn or whatever. I never got around to taking it at my first school, but at my second middle school, the librarian was much more friendly and more insistent that I needed to take the course. So I did. It was about 15 minutes long, showed you how to open Netscape, and showed you how to access the school district's email via Outlook. I think the first person I emailed was my dad. He was the only other person I knew that had email!