said by Skippy25:You paid your phone bill which allowed you to use a modem to connect to the ISP of YOUR choice to connect to the internet.
Not exactly.
Your choices were limited to those ISPs who had a local access number, unless you intended to pay per minute long distance rates to be online.
Maybe that doesn't mean anything to an urbanite, but out in the sticks we were lucky to have one or two ISPs with a local number. Many locations had no local access number until the end of the 90s.