I was born in 1984.

In elementary school, there was one computer in the library where you could visit an online encyclopedia. By the time I finished we had dialup at home (56 kbps).

In high school they had to block Napster on the school computers because we were all pirates. I got high speed (1 Mbps) at home around grade 11.

“The 90s” is too large a time for a single answer for this. I’d divide it into 3 different answers:

1990-1993 - This is the Pre-World Wide Web. Yes, the internet before web browsers! Internet access was the easiest and most accessible for university students and those in academia. You would have a “shell account” which would get you email, FTP, Telnet (which could offer real-time chat), and Gopher (which was the Betamax of the Web). Those not at university could access parts of this through paid online services such as CompuServe, Prodigy, or America Online (AOL). BBSes of the day also had access to a type of Internet email called Fidonet, which allowed BBS users to send and receive email (with huge batch delays) to internet users.

1993-1995 - The web is born! The web was now a thing, however it was being bolted on to the existing technology of the day. For home computers Windows 3.1 was the largest OS in use and MacOS had a smaller following. Linux had just entered the public consciousness at this time with the release of the first Linux Slackware release. This is the first time most people had ever bought a modem for their computer and dialed out. This era had some horrible teething issues like IRQs being shared or exhausted (if you had too many peripherals) where you could stop your printer or soundcard from working by using your modem. The software was equally bad. Windows didn’t come with TCP/IP. One common example was Trumpet Winsock to bring TCP/IP functionality to Windows with a SLIP or PPP connection. The first web browser NCSA Mosaic was release! The web is born! Netscape Navigator, initially release free, then became a paid app. Yes, you had to buy your web browser.

Many regular people would purchase their software tools to get online with this product (IP support, dialer, browser)

1995-1999 - The internet age is upon us! People were buying computers for the first time just to get online. Windows 95 (with the sold separately Microsoft Plus pack) was released which was the first version of Windows to include all the software parts needed to get online (OS, dialer, browser). “Surfing the internet” and “Computer hacking” had now enter the popular vocabulary. BTW, almost no one who hobbied at computing called it “surfing the internet”. That ended up being a type of anti-shibboleth. If someone said it, you knew they were a poser. Since regular people were now getting online you ended up having some weird cross-over products like this book. Again, no one that was a regular user would buy this, but when I was working in a retail computer store in the 90s, I can’t tell you how many copies of this I saw go out the door with a cheap Packard Bell computer bundle

Decades later I bought an old copy of this. In its pages is a time capsule of what the internet looked like at the time.

I had a job tutoring my teachers, who actually had decent computers, and modems, and subscriptions to ISPs. None of which I had.

So I’d tell them I was doing work on their Mac to get it up to speed, and they’d go in the other room, and I’d download as much gay porn as I could while my little heart raced.

Does that answer the question

It wasn’t bad. AOL sent you cd’s full of the Internet, and if you used up one cd, another would be waiting for you in your mailbox.

Easy, you just had to dial up first. Took about 30 seconds, IIRC. It was automated, in that your dialup client had the gateway phone number and user credentials stored. You literally just had to click ‘connect’ and let it do its thing. ISDN worked the same way as modem in this regard, even if the underlying tech was very different, topologically speaking.

Once you were on, it was easier in many respects, as everyone had to take bandwidth constraints into account: There weren’t a billion asynchronous Javascript calls happening in the background, and cookies weren’t used for everything.

Websites were rarely more than a few kilobytes in size, resulting in pageloads happening just as fast if not faster than today, except from the pictures (which took a little longer). Pictures were scaled to accommodate modemers - websites that didn’t never got much of an audience.

One way by 1994 was you got your Windows 3.1 computer and you get a modem and plug it to your landline. You install an app called Trumpet Winsock and then you then you pay for a subscription to an Internet Service Provider (ISP). Then your computer uses the landline to call your ISP to connect to the internet.

Then you run a browser and its like today but slower and more primitive.

The 90’s is the decade when the internet took off. Ease of access (and stuff worth accessing) increased dramatically over the course of a few years.

In 1990 if you didn’t have access through a university or your job then you would need a subscription service that connected over your home phone line. It wasn’t difficult, really, but it was a niche hobby thing that used expensive equipment, so most people didn’t even notice it. You had email, newsgroups, ftp servers, and bulletin boards, but not the modern concept of “the web”.

By around 1995 the web existed and was really taking off. Companies like Yahoo, Netscape, ebay, and Amazon were founded and high(er) speed dedicated connections started to become available to home users.

By 1999 you have mega sites like Google and Paypal, the first great browser war was raging, and high-speed DSL and cable connections were becoming standard in homes.

My father was a wannabe tech guy, so we had internet for almost as long as I have memories.

The computer would scream whenever you tried to access the internet though.

I miss it.

It was easy, unless someone else in the house wanted to use the phone at the same time…

In my country we were paying per minute of access. I think it came to $10 per hour? That was about 2x what it’s worth today. Cheaper off-peak rates.

So you’d connect, download all your emails and Usenet groups, then disconnect ASAP.

Then some company started offering unlimited free access but they injected popup ads into web pages whenever they felt like it, which was often, and browsers had no popup blocking functionality.

start of the 90’s dial up end of it you had cable and dsl connections.

It wasn’t hard, not for me growing up. Parents paid for a second, dedicated phone line and we used that for AOL, which we were subbed to for most of the 90’s. From my end, it was simple. Username + Password, hit connect, modem dialed in, internet. It wasn’t fast by any means but the web and what you did on it was a lot different. Nowhere near as many images, video was nowhere to be seen, and gaming online was a lag fest at the best of times. But we didn’t have anything else, so it was fine. We didn’t know any better. It was good enough to find the info we needed to find, and Lord knows I was having plenty of fun in chat rooms talking with random people from God only knows where.

you just had to wait until mum and dad are sleeping

Not that hard if you had the money. It just used the phone line. But computers were expensive, phone bills were expensive, and ISP costs were another charge on top of that. Often times, they charged by the minute just like your phone company did, so it was like paying twice for a phone call.

Once you dialed in, everything was much the same as today. Even the earliest internet PCs still needed a modem, just the modem would need to dial a phone number instead of being always connected like today. Everything took longer to load. Instead of having multiple megabytes down, you’d have a few kilobytes down. A single picture would take 5 seconds or longer. The web was still mostly reading, rather than video like today. Most you’d get back then was a GIF, and it would take ~5 secs to download each frame.