Moreover...
I agree with all of apotheon's points and wish to add a couple of my own.
There was indeed an Internet (mostly as we know it) in 1989, with DNS, DHCP, email, newsgroups, FTP sites, etc. It had long sinced bypassed it's ARPANET roots. What we didn't have was a graphical Internet, i.e. the World Wide Web, or search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Lycos, et. al. Our searches were done by spiders, or gopher.
He also neglected to note that universities and large businesses significantly outnumbered the number of military installations with an Internet presence in 1989. Most of the connections in these institutions were via an Ethernet or Token-Ring 10Mbit connection, while the backbone connections were via T1 or (in rare cases) DS3. My personal (at home) connection was a 9600 baud Telebit Trailblazer modem.
I'll concede that the Internet wasn't nearly as ubiquitous as it is today, and there was still a significant minority of machine-machine connections that were made with UUCP while a lot of email was sent using bang-path addressing. But I can recall universities in Finland, Japan, Australia and elsewhere coming online with always-on Internet connections through trans-oceanic cables.
While most of the BBS systems of the day (Compuserve, etc.) were only available at 2400 baud, they weren't part of the Internet. Just because the author was ignorant of the Internet in 1989 doesn't mean that it didn't exist.
ron
