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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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.
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