I had a couple of magazine CDs that I got from a trial subscription.

https://archive.org/details/launchcdmagazine

AOL zines were pretty neat.

https://medium.com/s/requiem-for-an-internet/how-aols-tween-zine-scene-pioneered-the-digital-self-9f2e261a6d2a

Researching for essays was annoying because you had to actually leave your house and go to a library to get books. (But libraries are fun for personal reading.)

"You have mail"

Using two VCRs to edit a video project for English class.

Bullshit they could work on channel 4 too; the NES and the SNES both had a switch in the back for that, I assume the Genesis and TurboGrafx16 did too

Please insert disk 10/12

If I wanted to talk to someone who wasn't in the same location as me, I had to know the ten digit number assigned to them.

Channel 3 or 4 I believe. They're set such that woukd allow you to choose if one or the other was selected for something like a vcr. This was the precursor to different inputs on tvs.

Let me just call someone if they're still at home on this payphone to look it up in the encyclopedia that was printed 20 years ago

yeah, I see all your extreme gen X nostalgia, dial-up internet browsing, floppy disk hole punching, cassette pencil rewinding, unshielded electronics interference having, family party line sharing, coin return checking asses, and I raise you something only REAL old kids will remember:

Silly Bandz. Only the real old heads will remember kids trading various kinds of silly bandz with each other. Alternatively, depending on how much the people around you believed in pseudoscience, the power balance hologram bracelets could also be found around people's wrists, at that time.

Lawn darts.