Out of curiosity, what kind of hardware/software was included in a CompuServe starter kit?

Hopefully someone else can answer this better than I can, but from what I remember, there was no hardware included. You had to buy an old style modem separately, like something out of Wargames.

Then you got software that allowed you to connect along with an hour of connection time.

University access.

My mom worked at a university when she bought me the C64 and the starter kit. Towards the end of this period, I was going to university. We did not have that type of access.

Some doubtless had access to the Internet in the late 70s/early 80s but random students generally did not even at universities that were connected to the Internet. When I was in school I remember someone at the AI Lab printing out a long Usenet thread related to Star Wars but I certainly didn’t have access. Indeed, outside of one class, I barely used a computer undergrad even as a non-CS engineering major.

For practical purposes smartphones don't exist for a lot of people today, but we're not saying we're in the pre-smartphone era.

If a smartphone cost a dollar a minute to use, we would be saying we're in the pre-smartphone era.

Edit: sorry, per minute, not per hour.

I'm sure there are places in the world where a smartphone basically costs way more than that.

Just because your access was a dollar an hour, does not mean it didn't exist.