How did a person get online before user-friendly ISPs like Delphi started offering Internet access in late 1992?
I know that a company called Alternet was offering commercial Internet access as early as the beginning of 1990, however I'm not sure exactly what the nature of the service was. EUnet launched an Internet service that was also open to commercial users at the exact same time, but again I'm not sure if it was the kind of access you could get onto a PC at home or something that was catering only to businesses and organizations that had people of technical know-how. From 1990 on, could anyone buy Internet access for themselves if they were willing to pay the money? I do know that for the first couple years their services were very expensive - like $1000 a month or something ridiculous. There's only a handful of sources online that even reference these early Internet companies so I'm clueless as to how user-friendly and accessible to the average computer user they were.
Would Internet access from these companies during this time be something that a non-technical person could navigate? If you got Alternet dial-up for example in 1991, would you get a user-friendly AOL-like interface installed too? Would it work on your Macintosh, or would you need a special Unix computer to access it?
The Web was basically non-existent at this time (in 1992 there were fewer than 100 websites, and it didn't really attract attention until 1994), so it would have mostly consisted of FTP files and e-mail service. Search ability was extremely limited too I would imagine, since all you had was Archie and Gopher, which were not nearly as useful as Google. Prior to Archie's release in late 1990 I think you would have had to have someone tell you via e-mail or Usenet where a file's location was if you wanted to access it.
Was home Internet access (true Internet, not just Compuserve or Prodigy) extremely rare prior to 1993? Also, was it possible at all to get the Internet at home in the late 1980s? Could you dial into a college or something if you wanted to access some of the FTP files on the NSFnet? Could a nerd in 1989 e-mail a researcher in Finland if they wanted to from their home PC? Was Usenet available before the real Internet?
You have a lot of questions here, so I'll just stick to the ones I had personal experience with. I first got online in 1987 from work and about 1988 from home. For the home access, I used a 1200 baud modem and either dialed into Compuserve or various local BBS services. As a government contractor, I was provided with Arpanet TTY access that I could use to login to a terminal shell account on my SCO Unix machine on my desk at work.
UUNet style feeds were also available at that time, however I didn't use one until about 1992. I used the feed to route domain style email and Usenet groups to/from AIX servers for employees at my work. I was a hassle to write sendmail rules to translate to/from bang style email addressing, but it work.
Anybody with a home pc, a modem and the installation diskettes from Aol, Compuserve, Prodigy, etc could get "online" at the time. However, "online" really only meant you could access the specific information and services provided by the service provider. Even with the wider access I had from work, the content was primitive and limited to Usenet groups, gopher/ftp, etc. It didn't really take off until HTML and web browsers came around.
I never paid "$1000/month" for anything, however I had to be careful to limit my time spent online as Compuserve charged by the hour. I kept my expenses to about $75 or less per month, so I went online for an average about 30 minutes a day.
I've always worked in IT, so I really can't say how user friendly all this was. Doing anything in those days on a DOS PC required some skills, but if you could RTFM, it could be done. This of course all changed when the first Macintoshes came out. They were expensive, but people bought them for the ease of use.
Home internet access in the late 1980s was rare, unless you had access through a university or a government site, such as myself. However, my work access was limited to terminal access. I could download files from a BBS or compuserve, but think about how long it takes to download files at modem rates that were available then, 1200/2400 and then later 9600,etc. To avoid the Compuserve rates, I would get whatever I could from BBS sites, some of which were quite extensive.