[mwcampbell]

Back then, they called it a subnotebook, and it was plenty useful offline. My Contura Aero (in 1994-95) had a 486 (SX I think, 25 or 33 MHz), 4 MB of RAM, and a ~170 MB hard drive. The 3.5" floppy drive was indeed connected via PCMCIA. Its primary purpose was taking notes in class and doing homework, but I also did some QBASIC and assembly programming on it.

[mattl]

My point is in 1994 we had web browsers, home ISPs and more. There was no “before the net” in 1994.