I’d have to ask my husband for the exact years, but we were online in the 80s when there was no internet really. We had a Radio Shack computer with a 1200 baud modem and had a pet care site online The Pet Board. There was no name registration, you just called yourself whatever you wanted. One person could logon at a time, it was connected to a normal phone line.
Websites were Bulletin Boards and they were sort of like message boards. The “sysop” could login when a visitor was online and chat with them.
The site was busy 24 hrs amazingly, people waited forever to get on, usually you got a busy signal. Visitors had to pay huge long distance phone rates.
Some kind of ferret community started to communicate there and they left a number of messages that rivals CAP. They would sign on, type two sentences and sign off, then came the next one. All about ferrets. 24 hours a day. We just watched in wonderment.
Then we had a guy sign on and leave messages about animal torture, upsetting everyone. So we called the police and they didn’t know what on earth we were talking about. They came out to the house to figure it out and ended up putting a trap on the phone and caught the guy but there was nothing to charge him with. They had to let him go but he never called again so all was good.
Then we wanted to get listed in the phonebook. They had no idea what we were talking about either. They came out to the house too to have a look. We wanted a new listing, Electronic Bulletin Boards. They kept saying: But we already have bulletin boards. (meaning the cork board you stick messages on). We did convince them to list us properly in the end.
Then we moved and I got into other things and I didn’t get back online for years.
What would I do differently?
Nothing. Not a thing. 
Getting started earlier would have been beneficial, but I was busy with other stuff I wouldn’t want to miss.