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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Cell towers??? Internet existed before there were data connections via cell.
We used dial-up modems connecting via landline phones to dial into local ISP’s. Then services like DSL that were always on, higher speed connections, came about that didn’t tie up phone line while online.
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.
In the beginning the internet was just a bunch of universities and research institutions and a very small number of private companies networking their computers together.
People who studied the right subjects at university got used to using email and USENET when they were students and many kept using it when they entered the private sector if their employer had the resources.
Eventually the first proto-ISPs appeared so those who could afford it could connect their home computer to the internet via their phone.
It was a small community for the longest time. Around the beginning of the 90s people posted messages to USENET about thing like “Linux” or a “WorldWideWeb” that they had come up with.
Year after year a new crop of students would be introduced to the Internet. It got bigger more userfriendly and instead of just a tiny group of students who were studying the right subjects every student got to use the university computer to go online.
Each year in September the number of new users grew and they were assimilated. Then in 1993 the Eternal September came and assimilation broke down.
Rules like don’t SPAM got broken and people started to commercialize what had previously been the work of just amateurs and hobbyist and non-profits.
The World Wide Web thing took off and other parts of the Internet fell by the way side.
Average people started buying Computers and went online with them.
The original paradigm of computer on the internet being equal was changed to a more centralized server and client model.
After even the longest time Microsoft who initially didn’t want to join in on that whole internet fad started offering something called Internet Explorer and Outlook for their home user Operating system.
By then the Internet was changed forever.
Infrastructure was built up, demand increased and people saw a way to profit from this new thing.
Existing telecommunication infrastructure was used and its use sold to customers and more was built as demand and opportunity for profit increased.
Quite a lot of it was driven by porn.
Cell towers were a thing that originally was built as its own thing. Carphones and cell phones and pagers and stuff like that. Only later did smart phones connected to the internet become a thing.
You had stuff like Blackberry phones and Palm Pilots and eventually the iPhone and Android.
Smartphones took advantage of infrastructure built for dumb phones the same way that computers with dial up connections used infrastructure built for landline phones.
Once corporations saw the money that could be made by offering those services , they adapted and improved and built new infrastructure specifically for use for these Internet connected devices.
The internet does not require cell towers at all. Your phone does. Your phone uses cellular technology to connect to the *cellphone network*. Any traffic from your phone that is directed at the internet (meaning that it’s not a voice call or text message) is split off and routed to the internet.
If you’re using your computer or TV or other device to access the internet, there are no cell towers or mobile infrastructure involved at all.
As has been explained in detail by others, the internet uses telephone lines or cable TV networks. Also, they dont dig tunnels for underground lines. Sometimes you can run the lines without even digging except for access holes every so often. Other times they might need to dig a trench that’s about 2ft wide. When they do, they run lines with a capacity far exceeding the current demand to allow for future expansion. Additional trunk lines are usually run alongside existing lines to make it easier.
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.
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.
I remember internet providers running campaigns in shopping malls, offering “free” email accounts. People was fascinated with the idea of getting an email account even if they wouldnt use it. I guess that started creating a wave slowly, getting the internet into peoples mind. Marketing is about creating awareness and memory on the brand or product.
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