I got into university in 1982 and was in the Computer Science program so we had access to the school computers. Already in those days they were networked together. I had a friend at another state university hundreds of miles away and he told me that if did a msg command at the unix prompt we could exchange messages almost like texting today. It was so cool. A couple of years later we had a very simple email client for internal school communications but still this was mostly limited to those that needed access to the mainframes. When I entered the workforce a couple of years later in the late 1980s we had something called the Wang Alliance system that had a full blown email system. Of course, there were chat boards and such you dialed into with a modem that also had those capabilities. Somewhere around 1990 I started hearing about the internet and then the WWW. My first access was probably around 1992 when my company set up a terminal that allowed us to use the internet and WWW with Netscape. I got bored quickly because it wasn't fully baked yet. It wasn't for a couple more years until it got good enough for you to browse. Back in those days it was all dial up on a slow modem. So much fun watching the browers paint the web page, sometimes taking a minute or two.