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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By the late ’80s, the phone companies had already upgraded their networks to provide urban areas with high-capacity digital transmission lines. They were doing this because they had the technology and because there was a market for it. Not a *home* market, but a market among businesses (including ISPs, later), as well as government, schools, military… everyone who wanted telecom services, be it digital or voice.
So, the infrastructure was mostly there already for private, government and institutional data networks. Nobody had to be convinced to build it. It was largely the work of the telecom companies, not governments. And it was all based on physical wiring, not cell towers; cell phone networks didn’t have a very useful amount of data capacity for end users until 3G & 4G came along in the 2000s.
The Internet mostly sold itself. I mean, people had Internet access at school or at work, or got a taste of it via services like AOL, GEnie, and Prodigy, and everyone loved it. They told their friends about it, and they showed it off. It’s just like with any other hot new technology; if it’s fun and fills a need, and isn’t too difficult to use, then everyone who tries it once gets hooked and doesn’t need a lot of convincing.
Even before the web started taking off in 1994, we were dialing into our college’s Internet-connected servers and using email, chatting, playing text based games, reading news, participating in discussion forums, and sharing files. When the nice graphical interfaces of the web came along, and we could make our own websites, it was off to the races.
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