I'm not sure who the individual was, but "In 1989, first ISPs were established in Australia,and the United States. In Brookline, Massachusetts-based The World became the first commercial ISP in the US. Its first customer was served in November 1989"
It depends what you mean by internet connection.
Most of the earlier systems operated as a terminal connected to a remote host. The dialup BBS systems that began to spring up in the later parts of the 70s allowed you to read messages over a phone line and to upload/download files.
There were a whole slew of of networks, (e.g. bitnet, uunet, nearnet, arpanet, fidonet, decnet), that were were merged into, or replaced by the internet. This process began to accelerate around 1985.
Each of these had a way to connect. It might be interesting to ask which home connection was actually an internet connection. The development of the PPP (point-to-point protocol) was certainly a major step towards allowing the internet protocols to jump the modem. This protocol was defined in July 1994, barely making past the 20 year rule.