My first interaction with the Internet was via green screen terminals checking my email using Pine. I found this text based world in the basement of my University library. I was in my first year of art school.
As a visually oriented young person composing anything complex with words and sentences was a challenge. I had taken a typing class a few years earlier so I knew QUERTY keyboards. But my ideas come to me first as short movies in my mind. Like dreams. Translating those to the word was not easy.
So I discovered HTML and its ability to embed images and videos. That was what first attracted me to the World Wide Web. I pretty much skipped over Gopher, but knew about it. I tried MIT based MUDs (Multi User Dungeon) and MOOs (MUD, Object-Oriented). But it was images, both still and moving, that interested me most.
The "Web" in the mid to late 1990's was nascent ... I saw it as a innocent place.
In 1990 I stood on a imaginary knob on a mountain top looking out over a massive virtual landscape. Like my ancestors did several hundred years ago in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and North Carolina.
Why I am here using Gemini instead of HTTP is a story for another day.