PRIs arrived a bit later around here, and definitely changed the game. I think it was late 1996 when they started getting popular. Before that, it was stacks and stacks of modems! I remember going into one of the main POPs and there were metal shelves, over 150 modems (Microcoms, I think?), power strips 3 layers deep, individual serial cables to terminal servers, and a river of RJ11 phone cables coming out of the wall. All this was in an unconditioned basement in a small office park. All those blinking lights sure looked cool though.

Our upstream was a couple T1's to two different providers. At some point, there was a billing dispute and one of the T1's got shut off. Everything was lagged for weeks. I forget the brand of terminal servers, but they booted off floppies, and stored their password file there, too (this was before RADIUS was deployed.) Crazy times.