But most of all: The IETF. They set up the standards allowing for the internet to operate on a variety of equipment with standardized protocols worldwide, regardless of governments and corporate desires, while giving them room to play around too.
I’m also grateful for these guys; set up when Napoleon was in charge :
—
I’d heard about it at the time but I never used it.
Commercial services I used back then were: PC-Link, America Online, Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi.
I was also on BITNET and internet at college.
And i used BBS’s, which was just people dialing into friends’ computers directly.
===
I remember hacking some of the phone networks at the time too. Tymnet, Telenet, and another one, to make free phone calls and get access to far away dialup computers a few times.
===