Did it exist a little? Of course. But it was dwarfed by the other stuff going on. I suspect your (and a lot of other HN) experience is going to bias on the hobbiest side though, as does mine. I only found out about the much larger stuff going on at the same time much later.

Almost all the early networking stuff (UUCP, pre-Internet internet like Arpanet, early Usenet, Gopher, even HTML and the WWW, etc) was academic institutions or related.

Often with military grants/contracts. Sometimes with purely commercial contracts, but even those were almost always for some Gov’t project. The amount of work on basics like sorting algorithms that grew out gov’t research is mind boggling, for instance.

There is a lot of well documented history on this.

Then PCs and halfway decent modems became available (2400 baud+), and things changed very rapidly.

Mid 80’s, BBS’s started sprouting like weeds. There were a few before then, but the truly hobbiest ones were very niche.

Then even more so with commercial services like Prodigy, then AOL, then actual ISPs, etc.