You're off by about 4 years: by 1995, the number of Internet users was many times higher than users of all other networks of computers combined.

There were million of AOL customers in 1995, but most of them used AOL only to access web sites on the internet and send and receive SMTP email.

Getting back to the original topic, by 1995 there were hundreds of mainstream journalists who where predicting in their published output that the internet will quickly become an important part of society. It was the standard opinion among those that had an opinion on the topic.

I worked at AOL in 1995. We had three million users at that point, and we had recently upgraded to a live Internet e-mail gateway system. I was the first Internet mail operations person ever hired by AOL. My job on my first day was to install the fourth inbound mail gateway system.

By 1996, we were up to five million users, and Steve Case gave everyone in the company a special company jacket as a bonus. I still have mine, although it hasn't fit me in a couple of decades.

Even as late as 1997 (when I left), most AOL users were still in the "walled garden". Sure, we were the biggest Internet e-mail provider in the world, but that was still just a small fraction of the total AOL users. AIM was much more popular than e-mail. Advances were being made in efficiently distributing AIM chat messages efficiently that would not be exceeded in the outside world until the advent of BitTorrent.

However, by 1997, I think we did have more users coming into AOL over the Internet and their local ISP, as opposed to through our own modem banks. That was in part due to the "unlimited" plans that AOL rolled out, but the telephone calls themselves would have to be paid for if the user dialed non-local POPs for our modem banks, and many of our modem banks were totally overloaded.

AOL's big "hockey stick" moment was in 1995, sure. But the "hockey stick" moment for the Internet was at least a year or two later.

I disagree with the parent post entirely. Most people in 1995 didn't know what the Internet was going to become. It was a geeky thing that most didn't use. Speeds were slow, most people thought gopher was a small rodent, etc. And for every article saying the Internet was the next big thing, there were many questioning what it would be good for.

Heck, Mosaic wasn't even in development in 1990. It was released in late 1993, and it wasn't until Navigator was released in 1994 that "browsing" became a thing. Most people before then weren't going to use an FTP site off an obscure college to DL something originally intended for X windows...

People forget how fast the Web took off at that point. From 1994 to 1999, the growth was just crazy, with improvements in features every six months.

let's say it was the beginning of an exponentially growing curve. For those that were interested in computers, the writing was on the wall. Science fiction had already written about gigantic networks and virtual worlds for decades, we knew what was coming.