We had the Internet, but it was for dorks. We didn't have touchscreen phones yet, so if you wanted to "surf the web" as we called it, you had to have a dedicated desktop PC, and you connected via "dial up" where you plugged in the phone line¹ and it literally dialed up the Internet. Long story short, it was an obscure hobby for nerds, like D&D or birdwatching².

Anyway, they used to mail you a lot of CDs back then. Some people got on the Internet using a CD that came to your house like junkmail or a phone book³ That's how Netflix got their start actually. You'd surf to their webpage, set up a queue of movies you wanted to watch, and they'd mail DVDs to you one at a time like a mail order Blockbuster⁴.

Anyway, you put this CD you got in the mail into your desktop computer, and it would call the Internet, or as we called it the "information superhighway" on the phone. Once you got there, you were mostly doing what we're doing now; sharing silly pictures about Star Trek on message boards with anonymous nerds around the world. The whole Internet used to basically this, but with cheesy gifs.

Honestly the Internet was better when people would make fun of you for spending all your time on it. Normies ruined the vibe.

¹ Back then, a phone was an integrated appliance/utility in your home. It only did voice calls, and it was physically connected to the wall of your house by a wire. You'd push little buttons or twist a little dial (which is why it's called "dialing") in one part to to enter a phone number, and then pick up this other part that looks like the "phone" app icon, which was attached to the first part by this tight curly wire.

² Oh, back then, D&D wasn't streaming and there weren't birdwatching apps, so those were obscure hobbies for nerds.

³ A phone book was a big book with super thin pages that was periodically sent to your house, and it had the names, addresses, and phone numbers of basically everyone in town, and then there was a second one with the same but for all the businesses in town.

⁴ Blockbuster was a business that rented out VHS tapes⁵ and eventually DVDs. Like Netflix that you had to physically drive to and browse rows of physical movies. Then you took them home, watched them, and then returned the tapes when you were done like a library.

⁵ VHS tapes were little plastic boxes with a pair of spools inside wrapped in magnetic tape. You'd put them into special devices that plugged into your television⁶ that would physically turn the spools so it could read the magnetic data on the tape, playing the film on the screen. If you've ever heard the phrase "Be Kind, Rewind", it was a message printed on Blockbuster tapes reminding you to run the spools in reverse after watching the film, so that it would "rewind" to the beginning for the next renter to watch. That's where the word "rewind" comes from, you had to re-wind the tape around the first spool.

⁶ TVs back then were these huge glass tubes with a little particle accelerator in the back and phosphorescent powder in the inside of the screen. The screens were much smaller, but the device itself was massive, almost a cube. You couldn't wall mount them, you needed a sturdy piece of furniture, "entertainment centers" we'd call them.