AOL existed before direct connections to the Internet of the kind that current ISPs provide were available. In fact, it, like some of the competitors mentioned

AOL existed before direct connections to the Internet of the kind that current ISPs provide were available. In fact, it, like some of the competitors mentioned in the article (such as CompuServe, which I used from the late 1980s to the late 1990s), existed before access to the Internet was available to the public at all (i.e., outside of government and academic institutions). Portals like AOL and CompuServe let you dial in to their servers and do things that today we associate with the Internet and web sites, such as email, chat rooms, discussion boards, news feeds, etc. But you could only do them within the portal using the services that the portal provided. The portals were not connected to each other or to the Internet.