In those days I had an ISP that was strictly UNIX based. It was run by a Polish immigrant and their servers were in his basement. It ended up growing into a 3 million dollar company. He was hired away by Deutche Telekom and sold the business to 2 other guys who were eventually bought out and absorbed by a bigger company. I was ALL OVER those USEnet news groups. Good old NNTP servers on port 119!!! I met a LOT of women on the singles newsgroups. That was a place to run under the radar and do such things. There were music groups, for sale, pets, anything you can imagine. The younger folks don't know what they missed back in the days when the internet was all text, running something called Lynx (links - get it?)? You could telnet to anywhere you knew the domain name of. I used to go to colleges and see what I could see. I once went to the University of Prague and found a bunch of people with my last name. Once turned out to be a math prof there and we talked a lot about ancestry. It was from him that I learned that I would need to knw the 2 block area in Yugoslavia where my grandparents lived to do any good because my last name is a very common Slovenian names.

Those days are long gone. Now it's "Set up an account. Give us your email - name - address - phone number - and we will annoy you forever." Very different time back then. Once browsing included graphics (Was Mosaic the first graphic based browser?) things changed quickly.