Going to guess you were cruising BBS, FTP, and Telnet sites? I was just an ignorant preteen coding Qbasic garbage trying to learn programming on my Dad's PC that year. When I read back on Internet history I was a little surprised it was already so active when most people weren't even aware of it yet.
At least now I know how Dad got all them free DOS games.
Scraping is hard on a server though. You gotta download the entire page and all its data instead of just the info/action you requested. That's one of the reasons other websites bother to make APIs, so bots and others DON'T start just scraping them.