During 95 or 96, I was explaining to customers over the phone how to set up Trumpet Winsock and MacTCP/PPP. Most people didn't instantly get Windows 95, so it wasn't the reason that the ISP existed. And it was already possible to access the internet to some extent through an established online service, I think I'd used Delphi, AOL, maybe others during high school.
Something made it feasible right then for anybody to set up a bank of modems in their apartment, to provide direct internet, and there was an explosive growth in small ISPs before they consolidated. At the time, I was kind of oblivious to the historic moment, but the one I worked for was literally a few modems in the closet of a crummy apartment downtown when I started and within months we'd moved to an office a few blocks away and were installing modems like mad.
I found this, not necessarily authoritative:
"In 1994 the National Science Foundation commissioned four private companies to build four public Internet access points to replace the government-run Internet backbone: WorldCom in Washington, Pacific Bell in San Francisco, Sprint in New Jersey, and Ameritech in Chicago. Then other telecom giants entered the market with their own Internet services, which they often subcontracted to smaller companies. By 1995 there were more than 100 commercial ISPs in the USA."
I think that was probably it - right then and there anyone could buy a pipe to the internet and connect some modems. It was around then that I heard the term "T1" which was a lot back then.
Maybe there was some connection to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Performance_Computing_Act...
