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Comment by MrFoof | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, internet adoption rates in the 90s was largely a function of ISP pricing regime changes.

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.

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My exposure to the internet came via MTV in 1994. I got a call at the house one day and they offered to pay for our internet if I agreed to comment on music videos in an online chatroom. I got free CompuServe for a year and a t-shirt.

>I think it was 1995 when WOW!, which was a subsidiary of CompuServe, offered unlimited hours for $15/month. AOL followed shortly thereafter.

I thought AOL was the first to offer unlimited hours for a fixed fee, with everyone else imitating it. Am I mistaken?

WOW! first. I know because we had it, and for that reason alone. Before WOW! we would do the X hour free trials of ISPs and that's all the internet we had. AOL followed less than a year later, and we switched to AOL only then because of AIM and their walled garden (talking pre-Netscape) was better.

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.

Fair point - but according to the dataset it defines “used” not as having adopted, but merely having used it in the last 3 months.

Point remains that pricing of internet access was a huge driver of adoption, even in schools.

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.

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