I've been 'online' since 1989 using a 300 baud modem. In 1991 my mom brought home a 286 from work, and we had a 2400 baud modem setup on it. I started getting in to BBS's real big. In high school, myself and 5 guys ran an 8 node(line) Synchronet BBS that had 300 paying subscribers. We had a newsletter every month that went out and all sorts of shit.
This was all before the internet was a public resource. I believe around 1993ish, services like AOL, Prodigy and CompuServ started to mail out 30 day trial discs for Windows 3.1 users. It was the first introduction to GUI based online services, whereas BBS were always text/console (ASCII/ANSI) based interfaces. They slowly caught on, but it took until like 1995 and the invent of Windows 95 before this kind of shit garnered REAL media attention.
Within about 2 years the entire BBS scene dried up, I mean.. fucking bellied up. The internet had arrived in the force of Windows95 and services like AOL. But even then, the 'net' of the inters was fledgling. AOL had its own services that in some minor fashion linked outwards to other companies using the internet. AOL was its own brand, and service for awhile, a large intranet with small internet features. But suddenly the fucking internet exploded around 1998 and people could get 'online' using a plethra of services. Now these independent services didn't have an expensive unified front end, so they just got you online. Thats all it took.
My friends and I had taken our 8 node BBS and met with business partners (mostly family) when we were all 15, 16 years old. My brother (did commercial real estate) leased us a building in our city for cheap and we bought up hundreds (later thousands) of telephone lines. We started our own ISP at teenagers, and had several hundred customers in a few month period (door to door sales). But being high school kids we got tired of it, the commitment and we all let it fall apart from under us. We sold the business for dirt cheap to some guy who then never did anything with it. REGRET TO THE MAX.
A friend/coworker of my brother later sold our property to this company called NetZero. They offered him a job, since they were a startup company. He accepted, later got his hands on some partial ownership and a few years later before NetZero took a dive, the guy.. now the kid (I think he was 25 at the time) sold what he had and retired a multi-millionaire.
FML