Born in '79 and my first views of the internet revolved around Compuserve. News, chat, games... Remember all those jokes about people who thought AOL was the extent of the Internet.
The ACTUAL internet was weird, because so much of it was slapped together by enthusiasts. Black backgrounds on webpages with neon green font were very common, with tons of animated gifs that had no purpose just strewn randomly on pages. Not animated gifs of videos, but of like an animated dancing dog. You'd click a link and find the dreaded "Under construction" page which usually meant "Never going to be finished."
Surfing porn was similar to the stories you've heard about watching the scrambled channel 99 on old TVs. You had to be careful where you clicked because porn pages were inundated with popups that would literally create endless loops of popups. You'd have to reboot and try again to find actual porn... talk about boner killing. None of it was HD, very few videos. Most of the time you browsed porn star sites and fapped to their free pics.
When multiplayer games were released it was a lot like 2 player Nintendo. But quickly turned into what you'd now relate to COD or CS. Thus the rise of FPS games began. It was hugely anonymous because no one cared about handles or nicknames. It was hilarious to get wtfp0wned by someone named "SuperSniperWolf007." Especially when he'd get kick/banned because it was a private server and he wiped the floor with the server owner who was playing at the time. Most servers were hosted by players and when you found a good one that pinged because it was hosted in your state, that's the one server you played on, and that's how you got to know people.
Napster hit around the time I was discovering that you could download pirated movies from FTP bots in IRC. It took me 3 days to download a grainy version of Fight Club and it was the most amazing feeling ever. You'd spend hours in queue waiting for a download spot, and then hope and pray that the bot was hosted close enough to download at more than a few kbs. Napster took all that stuff and just made it super easy to seed and leech off of anyone with the program installed. I remember someone telling me about the .mp3 format and I thought it was bullshit because .wav files were so huge. Little did i know.
Shit I remember when iPods first came out and I'm like, "WTF would anyone pay that much $$$ for an mp3 player when you can get one for 1/4 the price from SanDisk that does the same thing. Then iTunes hit and Napster closed, and boom, the 2nd Apple revolution began.