This article is looking at the older Internet from one point of view. There was much more to it than the Web. There were thriving communities on Usenet and IRC. People had personal home pages instead of MySpace/Facebook/Bebo/Whatever accounts. You hosted your own scanned photos.
I was on CompuServe back then (95 or 96 anyway), at the time I never even opened the web browser - my time online was spent in the CompuServe app looking at the board/chatroom/portal type things that it used to serve.
Strangely I can still remember the "phone number" style email address I had too...
Usenet is a crappy P2P file sharing system now, as pretty much everyone who ran a Freenix-rated Usenet server predicted. It was something much cooler than that before the file sharing douchebags wrecked it.
