I started out with BBSes and then found my local college had an outbound modem bank you could use for free (local calls only) and so I connected to MSU and dialed into Detroit bulletin boards to pay games and find porn.

I explored other things on the college network, but it was mostly boring stuff. I got into IRC a little bit for trivia games. Newsgroups a bit. There wasn't much until the advent of broadband and www.

There was a point of ideal bandwidth with DSL, though it still felt too slow at the time. It was fast enough to download stuff, but slow enough that you couldn't have massive js files to track users or lock down the content of your site.

Cable modems were the beginning and end of internet perfection. Everything wasn't shit yet, but the user base grew and so did the heavy, monolithic webpages. MySpace was half way between social media and individual sites. Once Facebook became the town square, the untamed beauty of the early internet was dead.