Epi, I must confess that I was hoping to not have to respond to your posts on this thread, because...well, to be frank, everything you said is just plain wrong, and I didn't want to have to rub your nose in it.
Where the heck do you get this stuff?
You started off on the wrong foot with a history of networking that bears no relationship to what actually happened. I know: I was there. I think the problem is revealed by your statement "Waaaay back when I started university, in the early 90s". The early 90s really wasn't that long ago, and much of what you try to describe happened long before you were around. Guess it's one of those old-fart versus the young whippersnapper kinda things. But trust me, it wasn't anything like that.
I think in that first post what you were trying to describe was the hobbyist BBS fad that started in the late 70s and peaked in the late 80s, then began to decline when CompuServe, AOL, and Prodigy scaled up the BBS concept and went commercial. We started with 300 baud modems, and thought we'd died and gone to heaven when 1200 baud came along. While there may well have been a few people swapping pirated software between Commodore 64s, that was hardly the mainstream. The first BBSes were hobbyist machines, which usually meant home-built, and all ran the CP/M operating system on hardware based on the S100 bus. The content was pretty diverse even back then, though of course since it was mostly hobbyists, the content was heavily geeking and hacking stuff. And, of course, the feeelthy peectures were the most popular...the Internet didn't invent electronic porn, not by a couple of decades.
The thing that connects that "history" to your later complaint that "The people with the servers charge money. It sucks" is the irony that those early BBSes were in fact servers. It's called the "client-server" model of computing: The computer you call or connect to is the server, your PC is the client.
And for all your laments about the passing of the good old days of computer to computer connections, that too is ironic: That's exactly what peer-to-peer networks like Napster and Kazaa are all about. And they solve a not-so-little problem that you swept under the rug: Long distance toll charges. Waaay back then, if the other computer wasn't local, you paid through the nose to call it over the phone system. But on the Net, distance doesn't matter anymore. Connect to your neighbor, connect to China, it's all the same to the Internet.
The internet wasn't invented by CERN or by the Pentagon.
Well, actually, the Internet was invented by the Pentagon (specifically, researchers under contract to the Pentagon). CERN was part of the early Net, but becomes important to the story around 1993 when Tim Berners-Lee of CERN came up with the HyperText Transfer Protocol--HTTP--which is the protocol underlying the World Wide Web.
Correcting you point-by-point would require me to write more words than you wrote, which I'm just not gonna do. You might check out the histories at the Internet Society, and the Wikipedia article is a good place to start.
And if you're curious about where I get my information, a lot of it came from the years I worked at a company called Ungermann-Bass (Wikipedia article), where I worked right alongside several of the people who actually designed the Internet. I was on a first-name basis with everybody named in the article.
OK?