WTF is this? I was at university and I assure you we were connected to the internet. I got a login and an email address from the physics department in `91 because I was working on a project on their network. I used Elm for email, which had been out since the 80s. I was happy to upgrade to Pine (Pine is not elm) in 1992 and actually kept using Pine until like 1999. By `92 pretty much everyone else at my university was using the internet. I could dial up from home via modem, and check my email. NCSA Mosaic came out in `93.
>ure, but I was a network engineer at the time and your TCP/IP was very, very niche.. you know very well that there was no "Internet" in 1990
There was no consumer Internet in 1990.
However, TCP/IP was in use across a broad range of academic institutions and corporations, and it was possible for pretty much anyone to buy access to TCP/IP-based inter-networks.
Which, if you were a network engineer (and not for Novell or DEC) at the time, you would know.
direct dial to BBS, at least that was the "internet" for me at that stage. The disparate nodes of bulletin boards wasn't what I would call an internet. And it was very cliquish.
I also used some higher-level stuff like telnet, FTP (sites mostly found via anonymous FTP lists), nntp, smtp, gopher, archie and veronica.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KA9Q