How long have you been on the Internet? I first went online in December 1995 with my 14000 baud modem, a painfully slow dial-up connection, and a Pentium 75 desktop computer 
running Windows 95 and a 15-inch monitor. I used Netscape to surf the Internet and Outlook to access my POP3 e-mail account. I also subscribed to several newsgroups. That’s when I met Kim Knoblauch.
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I think it was 1989. That was not the Internet though. I first got on bulletin boards, mostly looking for AutoCad libraries, LISP macros and shareware programs. Many of the BBSs were connected to FidoNet which gave me access to thousands of BBSs that were also part of FidoNet.
Not long after that I got a CompuServe account. CompuServe was huge, with something like 10K forums. This was before the Web. Any company who was anybody in the tech world had a presence on CompuServe. That’s where you went to get tech support, drivers, etc. The forums were quite busy. It was my first experience socializing online.
CompuServe also had limited Internet access. This was before the Web, so it was almost entirely FTP sites at universities and government agencies - in other words, the original Internet before it went commercial. You needed to know the IP address ( not DNS ) to access any of those sites. CompuServe had a list of some of the more populate FTP sites, but it was a very short list, like a few dozen sites
Those FTP sites were all UNIX based, so any file downloads were a crap shoot if the file was usable on a non-UNIX machine. Even if the file itself was usable, it was compressed with one of the many UNIX schemes, so you needed something that could decompress it. PKZip ( the original zip format ) would not decompress them, so you needed to find something else to do the job. That often meant the file was unusable.
CompuServe also hosted some companies that went on to become big. I had a brokerage account at E*Trade long before they had a Web site (since the Web didn’t exist yet). I also used the predecessor to Travelocity. It was a text and menu driven reservation system where you could get much better deals than from any other source.
When the Web started, I had full access through CompuServe, although the Web had almost nothing on it until well into the 2000s. Compuserve still had significantly more content until then, or at least it was much easier to find and access.
I used dial-up until 2006 when I got my first broadband connection. I didn’t see any need for it and couldn’t justify the cost.
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It depends on what you mean by online.
About 1973 I was given access to a government computer to work on a project. I accessed it remotely using an acoustic modem and a 30 characters/second terminal with a paper tape punch/reader for input/output. After a few weeks I received the manual for using the computer through the mail and learned that this computer was part of a network that could accommodate up to 7 COMPUTERS THAT COULD TALK TO EACH OTHER, although there were only 4 at the time. This was ARPANET.
At the time, I had no concept as to why I would ever want to access one computer through another. I was not a visionary.
A few years later my terminal was upgraded to 120 characters/sec using a direct connect modem. This seemed to be the ultimate setup for me as I could not type or read that fast. Still not a visionary.
Besides occasional work, we used the terminal to access an online Dungeons and Dragons-type game called Adventure on a commercial time-share system. It was the first game of its kind and totally text based. I still have a copy of the FORTRAN code for the game and the map that my boss and I developed while playing it on company time.
When AOL started, about 1990, we accessed the system, but loading a page of data was excruciatingly slow and I soon gave up on it.
I’m not sure when we got email, but it operated over an in-house network of Macs that connected to one used as a mail server that dialed out occasionally through a modem. This capability amazed everyone. It was probably just after the Internet was commercialized in the early 1990s.
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That might have been Colossal Cave. There was a game we used to call Adventure. I didn’t know until fairly recently that it actually had a name. If it was the same game you would remember several variations of “twisty little passages, all alike”.
There is an article at Wikipedia about the game. There are also several web sites dedicated to it. You can play online also. There is even a mobile app for it. Here’s one site I found with a quick search. https://rickadams.org/adventure/
My father and sister played that game a lot more than I did. My father died years ago, but recently I found some of his old maps.
I still have some of my father’s old computers from the 70s. He had an acoustic modem, but I never used it. He was also a Ham radio operator. He was one of the pioneers of using packet radio to send digital data over the airwaves. I still have his old duel 8" floppy drive. It’s the size of a large microwave oven.
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