For me its been since there were nothing but BBS around. Running up a $300 phone bill 1 month made my parents rather mad. ;O (just local calls too.)
Heh those were the days.. or something. Lets see 128MB Hardrive. Single digit ram. and what was my mhz back then like 16 or 32 I think. lol. So your email was carried on camel back eh? Dang I though 56k was sloow.
Back in my Amiga days of the early 90's I visited a few BBS's now and again, which I guess technically were a part to the internet with the mail systems and so on. I just used to downolad PD software so my first real contact with the internet wasn't until early '96.
I started using the internet around 11 years ago but only stared using it regularly from around 1998. I can only say many things have changes since those days.