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.

We lived in different geographies (you were somewhere in the US, I was in Sydney, Australia), being exposed to different types of enterprises: for me a private Catholic high school, and the Australian branch of the global US-headquartered pharmaceutical company for which my father worked.

I suspect your experiences were in part a product of which industry you were in, and which end of that industry - in another comment you mentioned DOS-based CAD software, in the early 1990s some big firms (especially in aerospace, defence, automotive) were still using IBM mainframe-based CAD systems running on IBM 7437s and 5080s (and if you could afford that fiendishly expensive kit, you could afford networking and likely already had it); as the 1990s progressed, mainframe-based CAD increasingly moved to UNIX workstations, for which Ethernet was very standard. And DOS-based CAD software and networking were not mutually exclusive-NetWare worked fine with DOS, and my high school had a CAD lab running the DOS version of Bentley MicroStation (IIRC, the DOS version we used was still branded Intergraph not Bentley), but all the machines were connected to Ethernet and we logged in to them using NetWare. Similarly, at my dad’s work almost all PCs ran Windows 3.x, but there were a few DOS-only machines connected to various pieces of laboratory or manufacturing equipment for which the software was DOS-only (and had issues running under a Windows 3.x DOS box) - and they connected those machines to NetWare too, because NetWare had no problem with DOS-only clients.