BBS was the thing then. Compuserve and such. Talker BBS chat boards run on "OMG WTF is that" stacks of C64 hardware (look up "commodore 64 1Megabyte RAM") or gronkulicious clusters of RBBS hosts.
There were UUCP gateways to netnews an mail built out of ignorance and Qbasic by some insane hacker but that was bout as deep as "internet" penetrated. "Joliet One" had a 3b2 but they were pretty restrictive with their feeds.
I had a C64 and my mom bought me a CompuServe starter kit at some point in the 80's. I think it was something like $6 an hour off-peak and over $20 an hour during peak hours, which might not even include long distance charges depending on where you were. That would be $20 an hour off-peak and over $60 peak in today's dollars. For 300 bits per second.
For practical purposes, the internet did not exist for people like me until the mid-90's.
Hopefully someone else can answer this better than I can, but from what I remember, there was no hardware included. You had to buy an old style modem separately, like something out of Wargames.
Then you got software that allowed you to connect along with an hour of connection time.
My mom worked at a university when she bought me the C64 and the starter kit. Towards the end of this period, I was going to university. We did not have that type of access.
