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.