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.
If you put the Kbin link or Lemmy app right in RIF's place on your home screen, you'll barely miss it when your muscle memory comes calling for you to push the icon when you get ever so slightly bored.
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.