I think I started using the Internet in 1990, and I was at the center of "GopherSpace". Email was the killer app, but otherwise it was only slightly useful for "information sharing". I recall pulling some US Census data, using a gateway to the university library catalog mainframe, and downloading Macintosh System 6 disk images. The entire AP wire was on Usenet too. But email was the real cool thing, you could communicate with your professors or friends at other colleges, or even meet people in bars who would give you their email address. This is when long-distance phone calls were like $1/minute so it was revolutionary.

Usenet was a slow-moving discussion board consisting mostly of college students where you could argue about computers or Star Trek or whatever. The most popular group by far was "alt.sex". Most people posted with their real names, but when my friend posted with a female name, she quickly acquired a stalker. (Who was dealt with by being banned from the Internet by his college's sysadmins.)

By the time Wired magazine was a thing and I wanted to start using the World Wide Web, Netscape 0.9 had come out and I guess corporations had already gotten their hands on it.

I still have a printout of "Zen and the Art of the Internet" [0]. Check it out if you want to get an idea of what using the pre-commercial internet was like.

[0] https://www.cs.indiana.edu/docproject/zen/zen-1.0_toc.html