First internet exposure was 1990 when I started university. Before that it was all BBSs... and since my home computer was a Commodore 128, it was all Ivory @ 1200 baud. Once I got a PC, I started running Citadel. Anywho... this is about the internet...
The dialin to to the university got me on Gopher, Lynx, IRC, and a half-dozen mailing lists (back in the days before spam). I remember hordes of classmates getting their jollies from jumping into IRC, joining #lonelyhearts and pretending they were buxomous beauties. Oi. I tried some MUDDs, but after being beat down by a "tiny snail" I gave up on those rather quickly. As for usenet, alt.gillian.andersons.head.on.other.peoples.bodies was a favorite of mine....
I thought it was a neat gimicky thing, but I knew the internet was going to take off was when this was going on:
http://www.well.com/user/sjroby/afkh/index.html
You see, I wasn't all that interested in knowing about the trial. But I was more taken by the lack of ability of governments to control content. Unfortunately, they really didn't need to. Now the noise to signal ratio looks like lottery odds. Colbert's wikiality hits the nail on the head. We went from not having access to all the points of view to form an informed opinion to having so much "data" you can't tell fact from fiction anymore.