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Molly Wood's avatar

I wish I knew, just an old aphorism that's been in my brain, I guess!

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Michael Scott Shappe's avatar

Two hundred years ago, very few people had even heard of the telegraph, and railroads were mainly short-range horse-drawn mining cars and maybe some efforts at local transportation. By the US Civil War, telegraph and steam-driven railroad, while not as extensive as they could have been, were extensive enough across the American expanse to change the entire face of warfare, allowing Lincoln and Davis both to do what Congress and King George couldn't -- control the war at a distance.

One hundred years ago, the highway network barely existed. Telephones were a curiosity.

Fifty years ago, ARPANet was the toy of a handful of computer scientists looking for a way to build a resilient system for transmitting data, with a handful of nodes using leased telephone lines.

Thirty years ago most people were still using the wired telephone infrastructure that had been so meagre one hundred years ago.

Point is...massive infrastructure always seems like too much work if you assume you have to boil the ocean all at once. The Interstate Highway System was built one inch at a time. The Internet's growth wasn't even an organized effort, it just kind of...happened as more and more people wanted it to happen, one node connecting to another node.

You gotta start somewhere, and then just keep putting one foot in front of another.

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