In 1994, as a teenager, dial-up Internet was a long-distance phone call and, unfortunately, was off-limits for me at the time anyways. After racking up a bunch of monthly phone bills of several hundreds of dollars each, the extra phone extension I had ran (under the house) to my bedroom had been discovered by $parental_unit and promptly yanked out -- effectively DoS'ing me off the Internet for a long while.
Fortunately, I also had a 286, KA9Q -- [0], not [1] -- a KPC-3 TNC [2] [EDIT: Actually, it may have been an MFJ-1270 (?) at that time], a handheld 2m transceiver, and a ham radio license whose ink was still wet -- having first seen this combination demonstrated to me in 1992. It may not sound like much -- and it certainly wasn't -- but it was enough to get me connected to AMPRNet [3]!
Thanks to the technological wonders of 1200 baud, half-duplex packet radio -- with something that just barely passed for "collision detection") -- I was able to chat daily with other amateur radio operators all over the world, send and receive mail, and even download files. (Understand that this "1200 baud" was nowhere close to the speed of a 1200 baud modem on a phone line -- which I would have been grateful for at that point!).
It was also my introduction to TCP/IP. Nowadays, I'm a network engineer. No surprise there!
Interestingly, six or seven years ago, perhaps, I randomly ended up on a phone call -- out of the blue -- with Phil, KA9Q. I worked for an ISP at the time and can't remember what the call was about (something work-related, obviously) but the owner walked in, handed me a piece of paper with a name and phone number and asked me to call the guy to discuss $deity-knows-what. (I did, obviously, and of course I had to ask "Are you THE Phil Karn?". He was. I'm sure he would never remember that but I certainly do!)
A few months ago, KA9Q -- [1], not [0] -- created an HN account [4] and commented [5] on a thread (about the sale to Amazon of a /10 of 44/8) and I took the opportunity to thank him in a reply, even though I assumed he probably wouldn't see it.
(Somehow, ~25 years later, I still have 44.48.0.105 although it hasn't been "active" since I don't know when... maybe I'll resurrect it someday!)
--
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KA9Q
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Karn
[2]: https://kantronics.com/kpc-3/
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet
[4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=KA9Q
[5]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24758472