That applies to aol, msn, compuserve etc, not to Facebook which you only ever accessed via http from a browser.

Yeah, those didn't count either. AOL and compuserve were not even available outside the USA in the late nineties. With AOL I'm quite sure nobody considered them to be a part of the web. Their pages didn't have URLs early on but AOL "keywords" instead. Compuserve also weren't using http I believe. It was some kind of commercial WAN that was pitched as a competitor to the internet, no?

> AOL and compuserve were not even available outside the USA in the late nineties

yes, they were, in the UK at least. speaking as a compuserve user.

Ids like 102615,1320, with pay per minute for compuserve and for the phone call

Personally I never used cix but one of the magazines (pc pro?) has columnists on it at least.