I know The World STD started in November 1989 and thus claims to be, but actually they didn’t offer true Internet service until 1992, just news, UUCP and other old protocols.
Alternet and Psinet both started selling TCP/IP in January 1990, but from what I understand they sold Internet mostly to companies and were not allowed to give access to the entire Internet without the permission of the NSF. So really, they were in the beginning sort of their own WAN that was using the TCP/IP technology, but not truly part of the Internet. So I doubt they could be considered a “true” ISP in the sense of AOL and Genie, ie a company offering a GUI and dial-up from home for a reasonable price.
The Commercial Internet Exchange was sort of a “parallel Internet”, from what I understand prior to 1995 when NSFnet was shut down and the Internet became a singular entity.
I know that if you could get hooked up from a college, home Internet access was possible even in the 1980s, but what’s the earliest company that could grant “all takers” a leased line directly to their home, that accessed the whole Internet and not just part of it or a “spinoff” TCP/IP backbone? Does anyone remember first hand?
I would say yes, since even dial-up AOL is essentially a terminal connection. Technically the computer isn’t “on the Internet”, it’s only connected to an analog link to a machine that’s on the Internet. Which is why all you needed to get online was one of their free discs and not a modem (those old tymes).
Doing some research it looks like PSInet started offering dial-up in 1993, though they were selling the TCP/IP equipment commercially as early as January 1990, possibly even a bit earlier “under the table” as they incorporated in 1989.
Well, no - present day dialup AOL runs a local TCP/IP stack on the end-user machine, which has its own IP and is network-addressable while it’s connected. The analog modem is just the datalink layer, providing a serial tunnel for the TCP connection, usually via PPP. (They used SLIP in olden times too.)
OTOH, my first Internet experience came from running a modem terminal emulator program which dialed into an access point that provided terminal-based client applications. You could get the same thing by connecting a dumb terminal to a modem, but those were a little before my time. In that case you’re not part of the TCP network, you’re just a terminal on a big central machine that is part of the TCP network. Even AOL, CompuServe and GEnie followed this model initially - AOL did not become a true ISP until a long time after real ISP service was available elsewhere, but they did provide gateways to various Internet services. And GEnie just went away.
My point is the shift between these two models was gradual and a lot of organizations were doing it around the same time, basically concurrently with when TCP driver software became available for consumer PCs. The first organizations to do it were probably universities and corporate networks rather than commercial ISPs.
Was this the case back in 1995? From what I recall, to use AOL and Compuserve you just needed to plug your phone line into a jack in your computer. Unless it had an internal modem of some sort?
I guess so. I forgot about that. I’ve been writing a history of the Internet and since a lot of old-time users are here, I thought it would be a good place to ask questions.
My high school had a dumb terminal with modem link to a nearby university that was linked to other universities. You’d make a phone call to the university’s special number and press the handset into a big box with rubber cups that fit the universal shape of all phone handsets. I barely used this, 1973 to 1975. Weren’t the universities part of the internet, and wasn’t somebody providing us service to it? I’m not making a rhetorical point, I’m probably more asking what the border is that qualifies an “ISP”.
My wife and I were customers of The World very early. We were accessing it via an Amiga 1000, so there was no TCP/IP use possible even it it were offered. I’d say they were an Internet Service Provider in that they provided a service that allowed us to access the Internet. Getting a full News feed or FTP without going through a shell was not really that important a distinction.
That’s how the Internet works: Every computer is connected to some other computer as part of an IP network, and the set of computers so connected is the Internet. There’s nothing magical about T1 or cable or fiber optic which makes those connections “More Internet” or “Real Internet” or anything else; a dial-up computer is on the Internet for as long as it has a usable connection.
I remember logging on to message boards in the lat 80s. I briefly signed up with AOL right after they dropped their association with Apple. I remember because I signed up to get to Apple-I was pissed that they weren’t “part” of Apple like I thought.
To the point of the OP-at the time I remember having to install extra software on my Macintosh to get a TCP/IP stack. I believe it was 3rd party. So 1988-89 not only was there access available to anyone with a phone, it was TCP/IP-as evidenced by the availability of the software. Macs at least for the first few years (84-88) did not have a stack, so that gives us a time frame.
In sum, I believe a dedicated person could have gotten on the internet in 1988 for the cost of a phone call (likely a long-distance phone call, but available), and maybe earlier. Now, since the web wasn’t around, you were just logging on to message boards and finding kludges to DL small programs, but that was the internet at the time.
You always need something to connect, commonly known as MODEM, be it a acoustic couplers modem from the 70’s or a DSL (Digital Subscriber Line).
How you connect (via cable or wireless) to that modem is somewhat irrelevant.
Also, once you connect up, you are part of the Internet. There is no such place as the Internet by itself, it’s made up of interconnected computers, which your PC is part of.
Strictly speaking, device is “part of the Internet” if and only if it is running the Internet Protocol network layer and is exchanging packets with another device that is on the Internet.
I subscribed to CompuServe (dial-up) for ten years, from 1991 to 2001, until broadband finally came to my address (a DSL) which made a dial-up provider redundant. But before this CompuServe started to offer ‘internet access’ sometime in the late 90s. At first you couldn’t switch between them, each time you dialed-in you had to first decide if you wanted to use internet access (thru the CompuServe gateway) or just CompuServe. I don’t remember if it dialed a different number, you just chose which one you wanted to use before dialing-in. Eventually they fixed that so you could switch back and forth without disconnecting. Originally you also still used their proprietary GUI software even when on the internet. Then CompuServe begin offering Netscape for sale at a discount. Then Internet Explorer came free with Windows, and the CompuServe ‘service’ became little more than a small internet dialer program to connect you and then let your browser take over.
It was an unusual time for dial-ups like CompuServe, AOL, Prodigy etc… As the internet (or the www actually) became more popular they needed to provide more & more access to it as originally it was attracting record numbers of customers to their service. But soon the writing was on the wall. Once the phone and cable companies started offering direct, high-speed service their businesses instantly became obsolete. I kept CompuServe for a month or two after getting a DSL but it was obviously no longer needed. I remember calling CompuServe to cancel their service (then, as now, you always had to actually call to cancel something) and the phone rep saw how long I had been a customer but I told them I had high-speed now and just didn’t need it anymore. I could tell that these were the vast majority of calls they were getting and yet by that point they weren’t even trying to get people to stay.
I guess it is The World after all. Their history is confusing, but doing the research, unless Barry Shein their founder is mistaken they indeed were selling dial-up in 1989.