GPS was available earlier to the public; I had a delorme rs232 serial GPS receiver around 1998 or 99 with pc mapping software on cdrom. Funny looks when you drove around with that kit in those days.

What did happen in May 2000 was that President Clinton turned off selective availability signal which made civilian gps signal much more accurate. See https://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/modernization/sa/

I was surprised by this, since I seem to recall some products earlier. For example Wikipedia says Garmin was founded in 1989 and had products in the 90s.

What I do remember, other than the obvious part that ubiquitous connectivity wasn't there yet, is that those products sucked compared to today. And that fits in with the 2000 action that allowed more accurate GPS to be used by the public.

Though even in 2007 or so I remember my phone gps sucking. It took a long time to get a fix and didn't have hinting from cell tower triangulation or sending nearby wifi APs to a server somewhere.