1992 internet had email, mailing list, newsgroups, Internet Relay Chat, massively-multiplayer online games (called MUDs) and places (mostly using the "anonymous FTP" protocol) where you could download free software like Linux and GNU utilities.

>There was very little content back then.

The newsgroups were absolutely huge in 1992: if you spend all day every day reading newsgroups, you could keep up with less than 1% of it. The same could be said of Internet Relay Chat and probably also of mailing lists (though I didn't subscribe to enough mailing lists to say that with 100% confidence).

Just because you never had access to it in 1992 does not mean that it is irrelevant to the topic of our conversation. AOL users had limited access to the Internet in 1992. They could send email for example I think to non-AOL users over the Internet, and 1992 I think is the year that they gain access to the newsgroups (including famously the ability to post to the newsgroups). But if in 1992 all you knew was Compuserv and AOL, you didn't know the Internet.

And again, one of the few rules of the internet (imposed again by the US government, which was footing the bill) was no commercial use. So for example there was a newsgroup called ba.jobs (the "ba" stood for "bay area") where employers could advertise job openings and employees could make posts announcing their availability for a job. But contractors (i.e., 1099 workers as opposed to W2 workers) were prohibited from making such a post because that was considered too commercial (in that an individual contractor is a lot like a small business and for such a contractor to use the internet to announce his availability was too much like a small business posting an ad).

>I didn’t have access to the Internet in my home in 1992, and the rest of the world didn’t either.

In 1992, most users of the internet got their access from their employer or their school of higher education. You could've bought access for $20 a month in 1992, its just that the Internet was not being advertised, so you didn't know about it. (Also, if you were living in a rural area, you might've had to pay your telephone company long-distant charges for every minute you were connected.)

Actually, it is not just that the internet was not being advertised, the people running it actively discouraged journalists from writing about it because there was a senator named William Proxmire who was good at getting the press to repeat his accusations of governmental wasteful spending, and the internet was an easy target for Proxmire: there were for example academics of every department using the newsgroups to discuss ideas, and Proxmire could say (truthfully, but misleadingly) that the US government was spending taxpayer money so that professors could discuss <pick the most ridiculous things academics might discuss>. (Here's an example of a journalist losing his access to the internet in 1984 in part because he wouldn't stop writing about the internet (then called ARPANET): https://www.stormtiger.org/bob/humor/pournell/story.html)

So you see there was an availability bias at play in which advertising is loud and designed to get attention (of course) and it tends to drown out information that is not part of the advertising-dependent information-ecosystem. (And again, the people in charge of the infrastructure of the internet pre-1993 were even actively striving to avoid any publicity.) Particularly, hardly anyone knows nowadays that many millions of users were using the completely-noncommercial internet of 1969 - 1992. People tend to think that the internet was created in 1993 or that advertising-dependent companies were essential to its creation.