My college had gopher early on. You could poke a South African college's Goper service a few times to tie it up and it'd drop you to a telnet prompt. where I had an early email address from University of Boulder who were just handing them out to whoever wanted one.

One day, there was a pile of people standing arounda computer in the library. Some admin installed mosaic on one of the library computers and we all sat around watching some people hit super early pages, mostly internet project pages. It was a few years before stuff really started getting interesting.