I just hope people realize that the Internet was the most compelling and most popular way to "get online" even before there were significant numbers of PC clones on the Internet.

Specifically, although it was technically possible to give a Windows machine a direct TCP/IP connection to the Internet, if you were using a PC clone to access the internet before July 1993, you were probably using the PC clone to run a terminal-emulation program (e.g., Kermit) to log in to a Unix shell account.

(I chose July 1993 as the date by the way because that was the month in which the New Yorker ran the cartoon, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog," which was the first reference to the Internet in a mainstream publication that seemed to arouse the interest or the curiosity of large numbers of readers.)