I disabled the silly menu provided my shell account and changed my default mail program to Elm. Then I sorted out how to access Usenet, used Gopher to access a Cure fan site, and then used Telnet to order some stuff from cdnow and cdjapan. When I finally got a PPP account (my shell provider stopped giving out SLIP accounts, and I had to switch providers for PPP), I did pretty much the same stuff. Prior to 1996 or so, I only used HTTP to access technology vendor sites.
