That didn’t start to change until the early 90’s. Al Gore’s contribution was actually important.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_and_information_techno...
> As far back as the 1970s Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high-speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship ... the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983.
I think most people got it from this interview he did with Wolf Blitzer on CNN. At least that's how I remember it. The jokes started flowing the next day. The number of people who knew of his work on internet related legislation pales in comparison to those who heard him say this on a major TV network.
"I took the initiative in creating the internet"
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/2011/0603/Political-m...
The narrative that OP has fallen for is so pervasive that I think it's probably misinformation created for damage control.
It's not that it's even a particularly bad lie as far as politicians go, but it is easy to prove it wrong and easy to makes jokes about it. So I think it could easily be considered damaging enough to warrant a specific PR effort.
I first came across Usenet through my employment with Olivetti. They were selling AT&T Unix minis at the time, so we had a Usenet feed via AT&Ts office on the other side of the city. Two updates daily, I think.
[Edit] For home access to CIX, I was using a 1400-baud acoustic coupler, which I had "liberated" from the basement of a former employer. Bandwidth mattered in those days - you could DoS someone by sending them ten pages of text.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler
(Not one of those, but similar)
