That's not exactly correct either. Around 1984 I was in Highschool and you could get "on line" via Compuserve. It was dial up but it used T1 and leased lines with other locations like the Airlines so you could, for example, view flights book a trip via Compuserve. I believe AAA (a travel service in the US) as also linked up this way too. It was not an always-on connection, but then neither was the Internet for many in the early 1990s. I ran a BBS in the 80s on a Commodore computer and I would use a dial-up feature to log into other BBSes to trade data and make it available on my site. One commercial service was called Don Best Sports that offered betting spreads (aka football lines). Don Best Sports, just to pick on one example, is now available with your Web browser but in the 1980s I could get Las Vegas spread data through a coax connection (data connection) from a local telephone or certain participating cable companies. This was all available in the mid to late 80s via an always on connection like the Universities were. Don Best Sports, in particular, would give you a cable modem that had a DB9 connection for serial data and it was a live feed in 1985 when I was involved with it.