Well... I was born after that. Even the internet I used had, well, this meme for example. ASCII art was common even when Twitch released in... 2010? The internet I used growing up in the late 2010s was still so inherited from whatever was stable enough to last through the 2000 dotcom bubble or release just after.
Well that's certainly not true in many practical senses.
Was ARPANET global? That was a proto internet but certainly wasn't ever intended to be global.
The full scope of undersea cables and satellites were probably not considered in the early days of Internet Proper. Even today, there are all kinds of barriers to the internet truly being considered to be "global", from companies semi-benignly tailoring their content, to China just having a completely separate internet. With licensing and local laws and firewalls and taxes and asynchronous infrastructure development and paywalls, I don't think you can say that "global" is the property that sets the internet apart from BBSes.
GeoCities went away and came back? I dont think I ever saw a GeoCities before present day. Its just a place where everyone can have one website and they are usually... Boldly designed, and personal. Right? I get why we need that now, but do you know more?