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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Hi!
If you are from a country outside of America / Europe you missed the early stages that I remember. In places like Africa, countries have “leapfrogged” our old technology and started with things that would be advanced compared to how it started for me.
In Canada and USA, we used the “plain old telephone system” ([aka POTS](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_old_telephone_service) for connecting. This was over 2 copper wires that were already in place for telephone service.
Some would be with a modem connected directly to a phone line. In 1978 I was using an [acoustic coupler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler) to connect from our high school computer lab to our university on a TTY device (which might be a [VT100 style terminal](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100) or a TTY printer or even a Commodore PET)
Our connection was 300 baud on a good day.
By 1980, we were well past the first networked computers over long distances but we were well behind many of the concepts of modern Internet use.
For example, I could connect to the local university library but my computer acted as a dumb terminal. It was amazing to search their digitized card catalogue (only newer or frequently used stuff got entered into their system at first) and even request a book to be reserved when I got there.
Computer bulletin boards were a thing that was in many ways better than library access. The bulletin board system (BBS) that I would dial into was run by a hobbyist, and could take 3 concurrent users.
We did things offline (games, conversations, produce content, tech support) which would then be uploaded by the BBS. I remember playing chess, space oriented games, roleplay and more.
HTML and browsers became a thing in the early 1990s. My kids are older than HTML. ([This is a good ELI5 for HTML](https://www.tutorialstonight.com/html/history-of-html))
I remember [setting up DOS access to a library system using the LYNX browser](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)) because there was no graphical environment in the early days.
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