>>149548118
MS DOS or Windows 3/3.1 was the standard for home users and most day-to-day business users, but most people weren't online, and for those that were online most had access through their university or employer, who'd be using a big Unix mainframe machine for large-scale business stuff or for teaching compsci students. Websites weren't that big a deal until 1993 (and even then, they were just static pages - no forums.), but long before then there was Usenet, which is basically a forum made of e-mail threads copied between mainframe machines overnight (when long distance calls are cheap) and organized by subject, and with boards ("newsgroups") for every imaginable topic. If you remember when Comic Book Guy checks "alt.nerd.obsessive" on the Simpsons, that's an example of a newsgroup.
In the workplace nobody except nerds understood how the mainframe computer actually worked (so long as it worked, they didn't care either), and in academia nobody really cared so long as you didn't break anything, so if you wanted to have arguments about which TTA character was the most attractive on someone else's dime, nobody could stop you.
In 1993 AOL made it easy for ordinary people to get onto the internet, including usenet, and the new users overwhelmed the original culture since Usenet barely had any moderation features and mostly relied on social pressure to keep people well behaved. This lead to the "eternal September" (so named because originally, newbies would appear at the start of the university semester in September, violate usenet etiquette, get corrected, and then fit in. That works for a handful of students, but when AOL is bringing in new people every day, September never ends...)
Usenet still exists today, but it's mostly used for piracy and spam, meanwhile the web has overtaken pretty much everything.
Anyway, enough of my rambling. Here's what nerds had to say about TTA in 1990:
https://www.usenetarchives.com/threads.php?id=alt.tv.tiny-toon&y=0&r=0&p=1
