Actually that was very normal for a new Internet user of the time. In the early 90's there was no web as far as the public was concerned so Yahoo (1994)/Altavista (1995)/Infoseek (1994) did not exist yet. For users of the pre-1993/1994 Internet, to use it you had to learn a hodge-podge of protocols and software including UUCP, gopher, FTP, telnet, NNTP etc. since that was the Internet back then. It wasn't until online services like AOL started providing web gateways (1995/6?) when 'normal' people really started flooding onto the 'net and it took a few years longer before there were useful web frontends for the majority of services.

And it's been September ever since

Imho the September was really kicked into overdrive with smartphone and mobile Internet adoption facilitating the social media hype.

Prior to that people would at least need to sit down and dedicate attention to whatever they were doing online at their desktop.

It required at least some technical base knowledge.

While nowadays pretty much everybody can, and will, pull out their smartphone even during very short breaks: It' all short attention span, relegated to devices were multi-tasking is way more of an hassle, which means people are also way less likely to do research on whatever they are discussing.

It's gotten to a point where in many places writing anything longer than Tweet length is considered something bad, as most peoples attention span just can't cope with long-form forum posts anymore.

Context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

I remember my school ran a contest where you had to find obscure information on the net. Things like when the inventor of the saxophone was born? You had to submit an URL so using the library was not an option. It was insanely hard, nowadays it's just one wikipedia click away.