This is free, or at worst the price of a local call to campus. I have regular conversations with friends and former students all over the country. This can be a bit dangerous. FTP allows you to go to remote sites and download all sorts of software. Some of it is good, some isn't.
Gopher is a menu driven information provider.
With Gopher, you can go all over the world. searching for information on a variety of topics. Hypertext will present you with a paragraph of information with several words in the paragraph highlighted on your screen. You can arrow to any of those words, press the right arrow, and be connected to another page of information which is related to the highlighted word. It is very easy to get to an interesting site, and then not be able to remember how to get back to it. Netscape allows you to connect directly to Internet without going through a UNIX server on campus.