My ISP was Prodigy back in the day, and possibly something else before that. Paying per hour was awful. I spent hours downloading a WAV file of some video game music from Nintendo.com and was so excited when it completed successfully. Little did I know it was a 1-2 second random sound clip - ugh so disappointing! :)

I spent a good month or so (unsuccessfully) changing my modem initialization parameters (?) in an attempt to be able to play Doom 2 (or Duke Nukem?) over the internet with my friends and their fancy Gateway computers. It was so frustrating. I had no idea what I was doing and no Internet to turn to. I upgraded my DOS modem to a Windows modem and it made no difference. I was sent a link to TEN.net on IRC a year or so later and finally got to play my first online game, woo.

Things were much more anonymous back then. I remember applying for a job with XOOM.com - I had been active in their support community for a while and they sent me an employment application. They had no idea I was underage until I sent in my application, haha.