The early internet was buggy as all hell. Nowadays, you call a cable conglomerate and have them install a bunch of equipment, which you simply plug and play. When the interwebs first came out, there were no standard modems, no drivers to automatically update and no giant congloms whose entire business model had been refined. You had a billion little "isp's" which would mail you a floppy disc with almost no instructions and you'd have to get your most technically proficient friends to help you out to get online.

Then came companies like Mindspring and Earthlink, then AOL, who had pretty user friendly software that automatically configured your computer to access the web.

Once you were logged in, the world was filled with "chat rooms" with hundreds of millions of horny men talking to other men and trying to trade nudes back and forth. The pics took so long to download that if you were a prolific porn viewer, you could tell within about .5 inches of picture (so roughly 45 seconds) if you had already seen the pic before, so you would hit the back button and try to find one you hadn't already seen. Songs would take several hours through a service like Napster or Kazaa.

AOL was plagued with DOS attack/punter programs. If you were pissed at someone in a chat room, you could attack them until it kicked them offline for a few mins. There were programs like Hellraiser and Master of Puppets, that had sound effects that would play to the other person while it sent them about 5k instant messages, flood their inbox and boot them offline, which would then take them like 15 mins to get back online.

It was a very slow wild, wild west.