Wow, 1994 was already so late for people to be cluing in... I remember a recruiter for a private IT/CS university coming to my parents place when I had just finished high school, 1992 or 1993. I asked them if they had Internet on their campus, and they had no idea what I was talking about. That's how I knew to stay away, I had already been on Usenet & email (via UUCP) for 2 years and was on the Internet (IRC, MUDs, MOOs, etc) via a local campus dialup for a while at that point.

But of course this was all pre-WWW. And in those days it was mostly scientific institutions, schools, and research centres that were online. There was no advertisement allowed, and there just wasn't commercial activity at all.