It was the first commercial ISP in the world that provided a direct connection to the internet, with its first customer logging on in November 1989.

[3] Many government and university installations blocked, threatened to block, or attempted to shut-down The World's Internet connection until Software Tool & Die was eventually granted permission by the National Science Foundation to provide public Internet access on "an experimental basis.

The site and services were initially hosted solely under the domain name world.std.com which continues to function to this day.

[5] Additional user services include Usenet feed, personal web space, mailing lists, and email aliases.

The World users may send each other Memos (password protected messaging) and access a list of all personal customer websites.