The first time I came in contact with "online services" was the PBX scene (must have been around 1993) and shortly after I was introduced to BTX (a text based service offered by German Telekom). The real www came 1995. That was the time when AOL and Compuserve offered their software everywhere and it was really easy to fake accounts. Only thing which remained an expensive thing were the phone costs. Both AOL and Compuserve only had dial in server in the next bigger city. Making every connection a long distance call..... 1999-2000 was the year when the first flatrates were available and I had a dual line ISDN with 128kbit/s. And within the next year (2001) I got my first broadband connection (aDSL) with 1Mbit/s down and 128kbit/s upload.
Thats quite some time when I look back. From the year 2000 on, the internet advanced rapidly.