> The Internet - WebChatBroadcasting, ICQ, IRC, etc - was like a gift from the gods in the early 1990s.

I grew up in a wealthy very tech-savvy area, and most kids except the really geeky like me didn't get internet until the mid or late 1990s, so you weren't as "backwards" as you think. You would have still been on the bleeding edge to have internet in the early 1990s.