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arpanet was a closed network, yes. This dude worked at Cern, and literally created something called "the world wide web" https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web linking up all the small educational networks with a hyperlink document. It was a wild time. Kids today would have been helpless, as you had to type everything and gifs were as yet undreamt of, although you could use tricks to animate text on a line

Edit. soon after WebCrawler sprung into being and his little 'homepage of the web' became obsolete. I guess it was like the reddit of the day. Finding shit back then was a mission.

more edit. we had the newsgroups of course. pave the earth, chrome the moon, uk.music.rave and a whole bunch of random places where people capable of typing could communicate. and Janet and Karen and all the boring sciency stuff