alt Hacker News> commenter above is talking about the enthusiast-populated internet of the late 80s/early 90s, at which point it still wasn't even clear if it was legal to use the internet for commercial purposes
Source? Not doubting. But I have a friend who was buying airline tickets through CompuServe in the late 80s/early 90s.
Compuserve was NOT the internet. Compuserve / Prodigy / GEnie were early versions of Facebook. They also inter-operated (email) for some period of time. IIRC.