If you date the Internet from development of ARPANET in 1969, it really wasn't useful for 13 years after its development. For one, the general public couldn't get on it. Two, the early Internet basically consisted of running a packet-switched network on top of the existing circuit-switched phone network, at drastically reduced efficiency. That was the only other network that existed, after all. Three, DNS didn't exist until 1983, 14 years after ARPANET and 10 years after TCP/IP. Four, the protocols you mention also didn't exist until the 1980s, ~15 years after the technology was developed.

I too got on the Internet in the early 1990s with e-mail, FTP, Usenet, and MUDs. I'm not actually an early Internet user. That'd be folks like my friend's dad, who worked at BBN in the 1970s, or the folks at Symbolics, who registered the first domain name in 1985.