My first proper encounter with computers was in a maths lesson in the bit of summer term left after O levels. There was some lesson time to fill with no real purpose to doing Proper Stuff. So the teacher borrowed a massive terminal and acoustic coupler from Manchester University, brought them in, and dumped them on the desk to demonstrate to us. He set out to make a dial-up connection. Absolutely Nothing Happened
After university, my first job involved abstracting and indexing technical papers, including those that were developing the seven-layer OSI model that was to underpin the Internet. Then I moved on to demonstrating the resulting database, initially over packet-switched dial-up networks such as Telenet and Tymnet. Typically we used a Texas Instruments teletype terminal with thermal printing. Although on one occasion I was using a large monitor, which caught fire in mid-demonstration. We were already using email on various suppliers' closed networks at this point, to communicate with customers who bought our services through those suppliers.
We could send messages externally to the system to a few places that could accept
X.400 address formats, but basically we had two or three closed email systems that allowed us to message users of those systems only. Oh, and then we got CompuServe, which was another closed system that, I think, also did some X.400.
So when, in 1994, the Internet became available to us non-academics, it truly was an Inter-net, interconnecting the email and other services that we were already using. Initially, we launched a gopher, although that was quickly supplanted by our first Web site.
At which point, we start getting into terms that people now might start recognising, so I'll stop...