I was going to say this as well. Even pre internet my first inclination from dialing BBS was how do I make one of these? How can I get a dedicated phone line in my bedroom? From there, chatting with people who called my board, then moving to IRC which was all UGC. Bots, scripts, file hosts etc. distributed servers.

I think my take away is more that these large “visions” of what the internet could be were made by outsiders from an outside vantage point. They had difference answers to the question of what the internet could be. The insiders were too busy playing around on it to think about answering that question.

> Early internet had little to none of that world order. Those corporations are slow to act and tend to be last to the party.

Those corporations dominated the Internet. It was NYT et al who was doing the publishing and the users doing the reading. Large, incumbent corporations dominated online sales.

That they were slow to react to the changes and therefore the user-driven Internet eventually took over from them for that reason do not change the fact that the early Internet was literally a one-way street.