For a lot of people, AOL was their original ISP given how ubiquitous their disks were pre-broadband.<p>It&#x27;s interesting that pre-web, you really had a number of largely non-overlapping online communities (which didn&#x27;t even intersect all that much within the broad groups). I&#x27;m not sure that most people appreciate how fragmented the entire thing was. There was no real universal email for a long time.<p>Individual BBSs - which also had some shared boards through systems like PCRelay<p>Commercial &quot;BBSs&quot; like Compuserve, AOL, Delphi, etc.<p>Usenet which was the only one which was actually part of the Internet.