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That is categorically untrue. The internet was available well before 94. AOL and Compuserve were available and provided access to quite a large number of peopl

That is categorically untrue. The internet was available well before 94. AOL and Compuserve were available and provided access to quite a large number of people starting in 85 iirc, and by 89/90 their free month promotions targeting families made it cost effect for most (they sent out the CDs and bundled them with magazines everywhere, allowed creation of subaccounts, and many businesses reimbursed for the monthly costs as email was really catching on). It certainly wasn't the web as we know it today, but it was the internet with direct interaction in mailing lists, newsgroups, chat rooms, You've got emails, and other network connected services and even games in the form of muds, all at the blazing fast speeds of the time, 14.4kbps, and its now iconic connection handshake.

dragonwriter 2y ago
> AOL and Compuserve were available and provided access to quite a large number of people starting in 85 iirc […] It certainly wasn’t the web as we know it today, but it was the internet CompuServe got limited internet capability (basically, just connecting its on-platform mail to internet mail) in 1989, AOL did so in 1993. CompuServe (and Quantum/AOL and Delphi and Prodigy and…) were not the internet in any general sense, even though most of them and similar services connected to internet mail sometime between when CompuServe did in 1989 and when the web took over. > all at the blazing fast speeds of the time, 14.4kbps No one was doing 14.4kbps in the 1980s; the first modems at that speed were in 1991 or 1992. They would have largely been 2400bps from the mid-1980s; in the late 1980s there were some 9,600bps modems that were really expensive, but they weren’t standard and were rarely encountered.