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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Others have covered the communications medium, so I’ll cover two other areas: core infrastructure and user equipment.
The Internet started out as a DARPA project of the US military in the 1960s. The main use was email with database access a close second.
Eventually, the system matured and was opened up to educational institutions. When I got on the Internet in 1990, .mil and .edu were still the major players, along with the likes of Xerox Parc, Bell Labs, DEC, IBM and a few other tech companies. The internet was mostly internetworked mainframe computers running UNIX with users connecting to the mainframes via terminals (or virtual terminals).
Alongside this came the personal computer revolution; more and more people were getting access to computers not just at work, but also at home. Community Bulletin Board Systems sprung up that would let people in a local phone loop call in and share things from one personal computer to another over land lines.
Then came the corporate interests. At the start you had AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy which were massive BBS systems that allowed people to connect to others that lived in different cities in real-time. They served their own BBS content and had their own mail systems and file servers.
But then businesses were finally allowed on the Internet. The big BBSes created Internet gateway services, and enterprising individuals invented spam. The world wide web was still in its infancy, but email, FTP, Gopher, IRC, Usenet, telnet, etc. existed and were heavily used.
As businesses started to “get online”, search engines matured, web browsers and HTML developed, things slowly took shape into what you see today.
Cellphones getting on the Internet were a relative latecomer; in the early days PDAs were usually tethered to a computer to gain access; it wasn’t until the release of 3G smartphones that the mobile Internet really took off.
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