Not the greatest UNIX workstation in the world, but we had rooms full of them at my uni and I learned how to Internet on them. Still a lot of love for these.
The shift from URLs accessing resources on file systems to more abstract resources (implicitly HTML unless the headers said otherwise) occurred around 1999/2000. Suddenly we were all doing it once we’d figured out the necessary Apache directives. It wasn’t just Flickr, although it and its APIs were a good example of clean URL design
Typing in code from magazines into my ZX Spectrum.
Learning a bit of Z80 assembly from a library book.
Being taught Pascal at college.
Learning Perl to create grammars.
Writing Delphi apps to automate stuff on Windows.
Teaching myself C from K&R to extend Apache.
This is a great overview of web tech as I more or less recall it. Although pre-PHP CGI wasn’t a big deal, but it was more fiddly and you had to know and understand Apache, broadly. mod_perl & FastCGI made it okay. Only masochists wrote CGI apps in compiled languages. PHP made making screwy web apps low-effort and fun.
I bugged out of front-end dev just before jquery took off.