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Peter Kaminski maintains a list of systems that provide public access to Internet services. It's availble on the network itself, which obviously does you little good if you currently have no access, but which can prove invaluable should you move or want to find a new system. Look for his "PDIAL" file in the alt.bbs.lists or news.answers newsgroups in Usenet (for information on accessing Usenet, see section Usenet: the Global Watering Hole).
Steven Levy's book, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984), describes the early culture and ethos that ultimately resulted in the Internet and Usenet.
John Quarterman, The Matrix: Computer Networks and Conferencing Systems Worldwide (Digital Press, 1990), is an exhaustive look at computer networks and how they connect with each other. You'll find numerous documents about the Internet, its history and its resources in the `pub/Net_info' directory on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's FTP server (see section FTP (Mining the Net, part II) to decipher this).
FYI on Where to Start - A Bibliography of Internetworking Information, by Tracy LaQuey, Joyce K. Reynolds, Karen Roubicek, Mary Stahl and Aileen Yuan (August, 1990), is an excellent list of articles, books, newsletters and other sources of information about the Internet. It's available via ftp from nic.ddn.mil in the `rfc' directory as `rfc1175.txt' (see section FTP (Mining the Net, part II) for information on getting documents through FTP).
"Ah! Dear Watson, now we enter the mystic room of wizardry, where even the most brilliant of all logic minds might fail." --- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "Welcome to the Pleasure Dome!" --- Frankie goes to Hollywood
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