retrocomputing

CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL (I used them all at one point or another) were all competing for the walled garden that AOL ultimately succeeded in. They absolutely were "the Internet" for most users for a time, and justifiably so: they existed well before commercial ISPs were available to the public, and were developed either before or concurrently with the Internet (not the Web, which came later).

Recall that these services offered Usenet access (newsgroups for discussions, before they devolved into what they are today), commercial portals, online games, personal pages, and even Web access eventually... and everyone was there. For a user at the time, even after commercial ISPs emerged, the value proposition was fully in favor of these information services.

Over time the Web continued to evolve but the clunky browsers included with these services couldn't keep up in features. Also, online games like Quake 2 required an actual Internet connection. Eventually it just made sense to move on, but there was a sense of "giving something up" in making the switch.

Everyone of a certain age had an AOL email address, and even years after AOL had its market share siphoned off by ISPs like Earthlink, those users continued to use AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). I didn't retire my handle until the late 2000s.

Fun fact: because AOL shut down Hometowns (and the tens of millions of websites it hosted) in the late 2000s with only one month's notice, Jason Scott was so incensed that he created Archive Team, which archived a chunk of GeoCities and many other platforms since then. Too bad Hometowns couldn't be saved, but GeoCities was the real prize IMO, so I suppose it's good it happened first.