> if there was a digital network there is a good chance it was Novell or Token Ring

As the other commenter pointed out already, the vast majority of Netware networks used Ethernet. I knew what Token Ring was, but I don't think I ever actually saw it, my knowledge of it was purely from books and magazines. My dad's work (a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant) was somewhat of an IBM shop in that their main computer was an AS/400 that ran the whole factory, but I interned in their IT department for two weeks in 1997 (I think I'd just turned 15) and I don't remember seeing any Token Ring, or hearing it even mentioned.

And this is the thing, I was a teenager in the 1990s, I was there. I saw Ethernet (and Acorn Econet too, which is much more obscure). I saw it at my school. I saw it at my dad's work. I remember one of my school friends had Ethernet in his house (not in the walls, they just had 2-3 computers in the family room connected to a hub/switch). I was trying to convince my dad to buy Ethernet cards but he wasn't sold on the idea–he was familiar with it from work (his field was chemistry and pharmaceutical manufacturing not computing, but he was technical enough to know what it was), but at home he was happy with Laplink. We had dial-up Internet before we had Ethernet; we had multiple computers, more than one of them had a modem, and my siblings and I would fight over who would use the dial-up since only one of us could use it at once. I remember around 1998 I was invited to a LAN party at a church, but I didn't go.

"the world were most people actually lived" is a bit meaningless, because then we are talking about what was happening in rural villages in Africa at the time. In the world in which I lived, my 1990s, Ethernet was widespread, first in school/work settings, and by the end of it, it was really taking off in home settings too. Maybe your 1990s were different from mine (different country/geography, different social milieu), or maybe you weren't actually there to experience it firsthand.

My 1990’s were indeed different.

I was firmly into adulthood when they began, I worked at ordinary small businesses, and was often involved in technology purchasing decisions.

Where I was working in 1997, I set up the company’s Yahoo email…one address for the whole office which went to the receptionist’s computer. Which was fine because important communication was done by phone or fax and if you needed to reach someone out of their office you probably called their pager…though cell phones were around, most business people could not justify the expense and cell phone culture did not exist yet.

The office moved files with floppy disks via courier or USPS. Backups were to Qic tape and files moved within the office via sneaker net…cd burners were still uncommon, large, SCSI, slow, and expensive. So Zip disks were more common.

To put it another way, I spent all 10 years of the 1990’s using computers for work. It was a very different life.