My first Internet account was with Actrix BBS back in 1990/91. In those days they charged something like $168 / year (no other payment option) and you got a 2400bps dial-up BBS connection to a Unix shell account. From the shell you could use email / FTP / telnet / USENET newsgroups / gopher and anything else you were able to do via a Unix command prompt.

You would download files to your shell account via FTP and then use Zmodem to download them from Actrix to your PC.....at 13KB / minute. A 300KB file only took about 24 minutes to download.  

Data was unlimited. Connection time was unlimited. Actrix enjoyed a 19.6 kbps connection to the Internet (via Vic Uni) and logged in users shared that (then!) mighty pipe. 

There was no world wide web. It wasn't to be invented for another few years.