Ok not “way” after - really splitting hairs here. Point still stands public commercial dialup internet was available pretty much everywhere. Call them early adopters or whatever - but the internet already had established communities well before 1994.

> 50,000 people in a metro area of a few million.

We’ll just have to agree to disagree on the interpretation of what “first families”. In the context I read that post it sounded like someone saying they were among literally the first few, not 50k to 100k when anyone with a credit card could order service. First families in my interpretation would be those that probably had access from their parent’s university shell account. This follows with the claim 15 minutes to load a single webpage - but unless you were on a shitty rural phone line running 2400bps it’s not like everyone’s dialup internet access at the time was that limited. Some had to put up with that but the tech in 1994 was not that primitive.