I'm in Chicago. I had a BBS in the late 1980s, Compuserve before then, and access through a shared university account in the early 1990s. I did not have access that I could simply write a check for to consistently get access to, say, IRC and Usenet, until MCS started in ~1993.

Obviously people were on the Internet before 1993, but I chose the term "consumer Internet" specifically to avoid this debate. I think it's clear that the Internet wasn't on Group W Cable's mind in 1983.