I was lucky. A public library had a dial-in account with lynx as the shell and the card catalog an inter-library loan systems served as web pages. I just had to hit 'g' and type in any URL, including Gopher, WAIS, Archie, or telnet ones. This left me no great way by itself to get things downloaded locally, but I could telnet into a shell elsewhere, download things to there, and feed them back via zmodem through the telnet and the dialup.

That was before I had a local PPP provider, of course.