I was in college then. My first internet connected app that I wrote was gopher based in 1994. You couldn’t find any useful information from most publications, it was basically useless for research, you definitely couldn’t do too much shopping. Shopping for computer equipment was still done by browsing the huge Computer Shopper magazines.

There wasn’t an easy way an easy way to search Usenet until 1995 when DejaNews became available. You would have never had the investment in internet infrastructure that allows everyone to get internet speeds at home that were unheard of even for businesses that were usually connected via a T1 if they had any internet at all.