1997 I went round my mates house and he had CompuServe. We spent many an hour downloading pictures to put on floppy disks for me to take home.
We finally got our own internet in late 1998. We could,only use it after 6 and my mum decided for no more than 2 hours so that she could still get phone calls (even though she rarely did).
My dad decided that meant regardless of who needed to use the internet we had to take it in turns (I.e. Sister got Monday, I got Tuesday etc). This led to situations where I had homework to do and my sister would just sit at the computer doing nothing because it was her turn. She also installed all those programmes that shows adverts on a quarter of the screen and paid 50p an hour to have them there and would get angry if I turned them off on my days since she thought she deserved the money. She would also sneak in and turn on Napster when you were in the toilet so you came back and the net was so slow you gave up. Took a while for me to realize what she was doing.
My mum read the daily mail therefore the only thing she knew about the internet was that you couldn't click anywhere without seeing a naked celebrity. As a result she made our dad look through the browsing history and check every line and question us. This was embarrassing because he was the only one who hadn't figured out how to clear the history so it was frequently him asking us about porn sites he had visited. He stopped doing this exercise after a few really embarrassing sessions.
The worst thing was coming to use our only computer and finding my mum sat at it playing solitaire. She could play that game quite literally for an entire day. I remember showing her my school homework diary and I needed to use the computer and she would just keep playing solitaire. Once the we got the internet her new favorite punishment was banning us from it so she could play solitaire all night. I would retaliate by flicking the switch in the fuse box so fast that it looked like the PC had just reset itself until she got off and asked me to fix it.
Eventually my dad put in a home network so we could all share the wonder of 56k (3 pcs on using it at the same time. Was slow). For some reason my dad decided that one of the networked pcs should be in my bedroom which surprisingly my mum agreed to. She was still mindful of the daily mail so I wasn't allowed to use the computer with the door closed. This was not a problem since my room was top floor of a town house, the other rooms being unoccupied during the day so I always had notice before people came upstairs.
We got adsl as soon as it was released, I expect to allow my dad to watch his porn without excessive buffering...