For the internet to work, there must be cell towers everywhere, many servers built, and tunnels built with cables connecteted to every home.
How was the government/corporations convinced to start construction? How was the public convinced to start paying extra to get access to 10 websites and hope that it would take off?
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It was not to get access to websites. It was to get access to computer networks in general, and at 1st the Internet consisted of a lot of different services other than just HTML.
Academic institutions were among the very 1st adopters, because it is very easy to exchange documents to that way and it essentially allows all libraries to function as a single library. Next were big corporations that had a lot of documents at different locations all around the world. Getting on the Internet allowed them to function as if they had just one big office.
The early internet used phone lines, which already ran pretty much everywhere. In the really early days, you bought a device that you placed your physical phone handset into, which turned the data you wanted to send/receive into sounds to send over the phone line. Eventually this got upgraded to integrated modems, but the idea was the same.
This was slow and inconvenient (someone calling you on the phone could interrupt the 1-hour process of downloading a single image), but even that experience of the internet was enough to convince people to start using some faster intermediary technologies (DSL, satellite internet) which are now also pretty much defunct.
In the 90s the internet ran predominately over the existing telephone lines, not cel phone towers.
There wasn’t all THAT much construction to get it started really. I mean, my first internet connection was through a modem that quite simply used the existing telephone line. And there wasn’t all that much there yet either, when I first connected there weren’t even any graphical browsers yet.
But once the whole thing got started, it became a snowball effect between more people getting access, leading to more people being interested in putting content on the web, which makes it more interesting to connect etc.
Cell towers?
Dafuq?
The internet in that era used telephone lines. Like, landlines in your house. If you were on the internet and someone else in your house picked up the phone you’d lose your connection and have to start all over again.
As for convincing people to pay… America Online (AOL) sent about 3.2 million disks (floppy and CD-ROM) each to every man, woman, and child offering them a free trial.
For me, the early internet was much more about interpersonal communication than websites.
The first way to access other computers remotely was using phone lines that already existed. The computer would “dial up” the phone line and using special sounds and audio, communicate with another computer, across the phone.
So, essentially, there was already a system there for it to use to begin with. Everything after was just improvements and alternatives to an existing system. But the desire to do the thing was already possible to fulfill thanks to the phone line infrastructure that already existed.
Progression went like this: Phone into BBS systems (bulletin boards), then you link the BBS systems so by accessing one you could then go through it to access others (instead of hanging up and calling the other one), then this became an ‘internet’, then you got ‘internet providers’ (like AOL) that gave you access to that system.
AOL in particular, would send out disks and CDs, everywhere, free trials, etc. Jokes were made about how common and frequent those disks and CDs were. Every household got mailed some several times a week, it felt like. You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing about AOL.
AOL was a cross between a BBS and access to the wider internet. AOL really tried hard to keep you on its own servers. If there was a good website out there, instead of letting you go to that website, AOL made their own version of the same website and tried to get users to use that instead. AOL really wanted to monopolize the internet, and given people’s low understanding and knowledge, a lot of people thought AOL *was* ‘the internet’ even without actually using the web browser and connecting to any server outside of AOL.
Ultimately AOL finally failed; the actual true, wider internet offered too much that was too much better than AOL’s version of things for them to ever keep up. And as competitive and alternative internet providers started to pop up, AOL’s entire “keep everyone ignorant and enclosed in what we own only” model, popped and died.
Even to this day you’ll probably still find some people with ‘@aol.com’ email addresses. It’s hard to find someone who lived through that time that never had AOL, in the US at least.
But, during AOL the technology moved on, dial up went from 9600 baud to 14.4k, 28.8k, 56k. It was around this time that alternative technologies really started kicking off, and ‘broadband’ connections came around, mainly to businesses and corporations first. DSL and cable, again using pre-existing infrastructure for the most part, came on board.
And since then technology has just been focused on making the existing infrastructure better and upgrading it.
But it all started on phone lines.
Nobody was on the internet via cell towers in the 90’s. Cellular technology was analog and relatively rudimentary at the time the internet was gaining popularity. The main technology for most people accessing the internet in its early stages was via dial up modem (phone calls to a device that turned voice frequencies into data). This was literally a 56 Kilobit connection at best although I myself connected at 14K for a few years. At that speed it took a couple minutes to download a simple image. Games and videos took hours. My first foray onto the internet was to update software on a hand held data cable analyzer around 1993. After that, I used America Online (AOL) to access chat rooms and other curated information. It wasnt until about 1995 that I realized, “Wait, I dont need AOL to access the internet, I just need a dial-up connection with some service and Internet Explorer or Firefox”. That was a big eye opener for me since at the time I thought the internet “was” AOL. So to answer your question, it was a social (chat) and curiosity thing at first but then web pages started to get more helpful and focused. Once Google came around (actual humans were indexing information manually at first), you could find information very easily. Before that, if you searched for something like “how to swing a golf club” you got results all over the map. In some cases, it could be something completely unrelated to your search simply because it contained the word “club”. But Google definitely changed that over time.
>For the internet to work, there must be cell towers everywhere, many servers built, and tunnels built with cables connecteted to every home.
All of this is wrong
For the internet to work you just need a way to connect between networks
That was originally done by calling the phone number of the server you wanted to talk to and the communication was done over copper phone lines
Later on ISPs(internet service providers) became a thing so your computer would call the ISP’s phone number and they’d have a connection to the various servers
Cell towers provide a wireless connection from you phone to the rest of the network. We now use fancy cables to every home for faster speeds, but we had cables run to every home for telephone service for decades before
The original internet connected the internal networks of several universities and research labs so they could share data easier, that had a clear payback
Internet in the 90s didn’t need any cell towers at all. It also didn’t require *new* cables run to everyone’s home. Internet in the 90s was run over existing copper telephone lines, which almost everyone already had.
You did need a computer, monitor and modem though.
As the cost of computers dropped more people bought them. As more people got online more companies built useful websites.
Firstly, cell towers are not required for the internet to work. Cell towers only help cellphones get on the internet (and everything else they do), however cellphones were only a prediction by Nikola Tesla when the internet was being developed.
It started a very long time ago with several universities connecting to one another. This was a system developed by the United States government/defense skunk works called DARPA, the system was called ARPANET.
Many years later, it was made available to the general public in a form that you would probably not recognize today, and it has evolved since then, gradually, with each individual, corporation, or whatever, adding to it.
Internet service providers are tasked with laying the connections between homes and business. They pay to install the infrastructure, we pay bills and taxes to support that.
As far as how the government was convinced to be on board, well, as I said, they developed it through DARPA. Most people in the US were convinced by AOL handing out a seemingly global ecological disaster waiting to happen in the form of so many trial CDs. I’m not joking these things were used as coasters, frisbees, they were littering the streets, just all over in the 90s. Anywhere you turned you saw an AOL CD.
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