By the early and especially mid 90s it was incredibly common for the users to have a graphics card. This was the 486 to Pentium era of personal computers. The Mac II line was giving way to the PowerMacs. Graphics cards were commonplace. Being stuck on a text terminal was already old school. Gopher sites were functional, but generally fairly bland. Web sites tended to be a lot more creative (some would say garish) and they were so easy to make that everybody wanted to give them a shot. Animated GIFs were all the rage. Backgrounds and table based layouts were straining the 14.4k modems and 8 MB of RAM machines. It was the wild west. Everybody was trying something different and finding out what worked and what didn't.
> By the early and especially mid 90s it was incredibly common for the users to have a graphics card.
Well yes, if you were lucky enough to have a new entry-level PC in 1994, you'd have a 486SX with just enough VRAM to run WFW at 800x600.
But, at least as late as Obtober 1992, the cheapest new PCs I see in PCMag are PC/AT clones running a 16MHz 286 (it probably had a VGA card, but come on). You could buy a cheap modem, plug it into your AT clone, and yank down some Gopher stuff.
Some folks didn't have a PC, but still had a computer. One of my old machines is a TRS-80 that was being used almost daily as late as 2013.
