Our setup required a POTS connection as well so we could do races between the two. We used comically large jpegs to do the demonstration.
My most memorable experiences from that time were from interacting with older folks who had never even seen "the internet". Some people had traveled many hours just to see the internet for themselves — even crossing state lines to get to us. And we felt like the Oracle at Delphi. Folks not even knowing how to use a mouse asking us to find information about their army platoon or information on old friends who they lost touch with. Some just wanting to us to explain what the internet was and how they might be able to use it.
We traveled with an enormous rack we called the UBR (which they told us was a universal broadband router -- which we picked up in San Jose from Cisco Systems). Sidenote: Sorry Cisco for backing up into (and majorly damaging) the fence surrounding your dumpsters!! This device provided a network connection to each of the four kiosks we had spread over the small footprint we were allotted in whatever court they had set aside for our use.
I remember showing folks how fast the connection was by downloading Doom to the local machine. The UBR would cache large files so in some cases, files would download in what felt like an instant and we would have to explain what a cache is and why those kind of speeds are not representative of average use.
I was a very heavy internet user at the time and had only ever experienced a connection as fast in the dorms on campus at the state college I attended.
It was a blast.
To Patrick (from Toronto) from @Home: I never did read RFC 793 which you so thoughtfully printed out for us on what seemed like a ream of paper.
Makes me wonder if this is starting a press cycle for something they'll release for sale in the nearish future.