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.