1996 or 1997 was the first year that I ever taught a computer science course that was entirely about the internet. We looked at the whole internet, not just the web, but discussed the idea that eventually most ways of communicating would be subsumed by the WWW because it was the "prettiest" and we knew modem speeds had nowhere to go but up. We encouraged students to be content contributors, not just consumers, and taught them enough HTML that they could get a decent-looking (for standards back then) web page posted using a free service or the few MB that came with their ISP account.

I was teaching at the high school level at an adult education centre, by the way.

Recall that the launch of the WWW and the "opening up" of the internet to "everyone", not just academics and the military, all happend about the same time (not literally, but in a short space of time). Most of the major time sucks were things grad students had posted. If you had an academic frame of mind or were just an enthusiastic reader, it wasn't hard to spend hours on the net at all.

Or maybe my students and I just had more interests than the author of the article.

Hell, me and my comp lab buddies were spending 2 - 3 hours daily playing MUDs back in the mid 80's, when I went back to college for a second degree.

My cronies and I lived for MUDding. We broke into the school labs on a regular basis to play late-night. We were, for all intents and purposes, griefers. It's easy to coordinate slaughter when you're all sitting in the same room and don't have to type to communicate.

I nearly lost a full-ride scholarship because of it.

Kids these days, who think the internet began with the web. Ha! Gadgetgirl is absolutely right. There was LOTS to entertain a person online, if you were willing to look for it. (And it wasn't all that hard to find.) I was a Usenet fiend back in the day. "Pine" wasn't all that difficult to master. Sure, there weren't any pretty pictures (of flashing ads) to distract a person, but the discussions were some of the most thoughtful and interesting I've run across online.

Which MUDs did you play on? I was usually on AberMUD at first, then on a few AberMUD based MUDs into the mid-90's. It was a way to relax after an 18 hour day at work.