Comment Re:Not the first, just the most egotistical. (Score 1) 116
Why? The IP network was tiny back then and the uucp network was enormous ans had all the apps. There were no people passing packet back then because nobody wanted to - they didn't need to. You could get everything the network had to offer via uucp.
OK, so there wasn't much of a market for ISPs back then, and most organizations offering dialup services weren't ISPs, they provided UUCP access or UNIX shell access or a BBS or....
So, if neither agora nor PDxs nor Teleport offered your machine the ability to directly transmit IP packets to and receive IP packets from hosts on the Internet, they may have offered very useful services, but they weren't ISPs, and thus do not count as evidence that The World wasn't the first dialup ISP.
If you want to prove that The World wasn't the first dialup ISP - not "the first dialup service provider", Barry's smart enough not to claim that The World was that - you're going to have to find an organization providing dialup direct Internet access before they did.