No idea of your background but I think it is very very easy to have a pretty biased view about how big the net got and when.
Coming from a fairly upper middle midwest town with parents in tech, we had home computers in the 80s and bbs access in the early 90s and IP Internet access via Compuserve probably around 1993/4 or so. The schools were wired as well pretty early at least the two high schools, not sure about the lower levels.
That said 1997 statics, show only about 18% of us households had a internet subscription. That jumps to almost 50% by 2000 so the uptake was pretty fast but a lot of us older Slashdot posters probably grew up in a bit of tech bubble, at ~1/5 of the population being 'online' it would be easy for an adolescent or young adult to not really be aware others were not sharing their experience.
I think 'the information super highway' lives a little more dominantly in the media of the period (1992-1995) then it actually did in most of the populations lives because it was such a huge area of commercial growth and the people who were using it outside 'the office' were the affluent, which always have driven our later 20th century American cultural conversation.
Recall how big a deal 'Cyber Monday' was, that was because people would shop online at the office, because they did not have access to do so at home! Long rant but i think for most people the Internet became a day to day feature of their lives more in the 1997-2000 span then in the 1994-97 span.