> Diabolically slow dial-up modems only emerged around 1992
Wait, what?
I must have imagined having a modem in 1987? And using it to download games from the University of Michigan? Over the, well, Internet?
Wrong wording. I think they refer to "commercial dial-up Internet connections". The first ones appeared in 1992.
Non-commercial, educational/academic, research... connections were available earlier. :)
Someone had better go back to 1989 and tell that to world.std.com.
In 1989 The World was a BBS service. You can read the history in their own words here: https://theworld.com/world/about/history/our_version
> If someone wanted a file from the real internet one of us would dial into an account somewhere, download the file, and put it somewhere on The World they could access it. Yes, manually!
From your link:
> in October 1989 The World became the first service on the planet offering internet access to the general public for a modest fee, around $20/month.
I read yesterday the article "The First ISP" by Spike Ilacqua, in the February 1999 number of the "Usenix ;login:" magazine linked in Barry Shein's home page.
There Spike says that at the beginning they only had a UUCP server and they called servers to exchange files during the day (like a FIDONET node), and they got their real "Internet" ISP license in 1992, just two days before Sprint got theirs.
Is that what people would have called it back then? I don't remember using the term internet until much later. Back then, you dialed into the computer system you were trying to access. Dialing into an ISP that allowed you to connect to anything wasn't until later, at least in my part of the world. Once ISPs started sharing/peering with other networks was what I considered internet. The old way was essentially what we now replicate with VPNs to connect to a specific network via the internet. What was old is new again
Back then if the system you were dialing into was a university there was a good chance you could access the Internet.