Wow that is significantly more than I would have guessed. Fun little comparison, it took until 1996 for 14% of North Americans to have used the internet.
I think it was 1995 when WOW!, which was a subsidiary of CompuServe, offered unlimited hours for $15/month. AOL followed shortly thereafter. Prior to that it was something like $4-6/hour, usually at only 14.4kbps - 28.8kbps.
Going from 2.5 - 4 hours a month to a household being able to easily surpass 100 hours a month (for households with multiple kids, easily 150-200 hours a month!) was an absolute game changer for internet adoption, at least in the United States. Then add in Mosaic (eventually Netscape Navigator) taking off and that's when adoption really ramped up. Then cable modems and DSL starting to become more widely available in 1997-1998. Plus instant messaging software basically being the precursor to what we would see later on with SMS.
Back in 1995, my local libraries did not have internet access available. This was a city of 100K a fair ways (about an hour) outside of Boston.
School? Super rare. Maybe ONCE OR TWICE A YEAR we would have a class scheduled in the Media Lab where we would learn about what the internet was, and then be able to barely poke at it in a highly supervised manner. This was despite the school having a few ISDN lines at the time, but that was mostly for backoffice administration, with only the one media lab having access outside of it, with a whopping TWO computers for a student body of 4500.
So even in a school with internet access, you might only get to get a vague idea of what the internet was ONCE A YEAR.
1998? Every high-level classroom in my high school of 4500 kids had two or three computers in the back with internet access. School added 8 computer labs (with 40 desktops each) that could be scheduled as frequently as weekly by a given teacher. If I recall correctly the school had upgraded to two DS3s from different providers.
I thought AOL was the first to offer unlimited hours for a fixed fee, with everyone else imitating it. Am I mistaken?
WOW! was fairly poorly advertised. We originally got it via a free CD at a store (Barnes and Noble or Office Max?), and they started doing TV advertisements a few months later. Though almost immediately thereafter AOL started their giant Unlimited Hours advertising blitz. Marketing truly won in that scenario. CompuServe had a shot, but no one knew about WOW! so it died in obscurity and under the weight of AOL's genuinely gargantuan marketing efforts.
I racked up ~$300 in one month of hourly dial up internet on my parents credit card at that age in that era. Huge amounts of trouble.
Mainly using Kali (software for emulating an ipx lan over the internet) and playing warcraft 2. Most games didn't have internet play as an option so you had to resort to things like Kali.
Irc was fun too but all in all it was nothing like you know it today and it was a pain to get on and use.