- at the end of the century (with apologies to purists) and -
~ 50 years since EDSAC ~
(which was the first operational electronic computer after ENIAC) -
"the net" stage of electronic communication is still in a sense in it's infancy.
It is only recently (the last several years) that computerised and
electronic communication has begun to be used by a sizeable
percentage of the world's population.

In the Beginning...

1943 saw the first operational electronic digital computer; Colossus, built by Alan Turing and others for the British govt., in order to break the code on ENIGMA messages sent by the Germans.  But the Brits kept it classified for 30 years which made it basically a dead end in research and development... a shame.
Meanwhile things were happening for John Mauchley and his graduate student and eventual partner JP Eckert. They completed ENIAC in 1946 - a little late for it's wartime purpose.  ENIAC led others to build, and Maurice Wilks fired up EDSAC^2* in 1949 (University of Cambridge).  The Rand Corporation produced JOHNIAC, UI the ILLIAC, Los Alamos Labs the MANIAC, and in Israel the Weizmann Institue came up with the WEIZAC.¹

1944 - Obsolescence -

- is something we are used to today, we even expect it.  But it's not new.
After having to spend hours doing calculations by hand,
Howard Aiken, a Harvard student, took Charles Babbages' ideas and built
out of relays his computer - Mark I, completed in 1944.
It had 72 words of 23 decimal digits each, and an instruction time of 6 seconds.
But by the time Aiken had completed it's successor - the Mark II - relay
computers were obsolete. The Electronics Era had begun.*¹

⁹³
1993
Annual rate of growth for Gopher traffic: 997%
Annual rate of growth for WWW traffic: 341,634%
Average time between new networks connecting to the Internet: 10 minutes
Number of online coffeehouses in San Francisco: 18
Cost for four minutes of Internet time at those coffeehouses: $0.25 ($US4.00/hr)
Date of first Internet mail message sent by a US President: 2 March 1993
Number of mail messages carried by IBM's Internet gateways in January, 1993: about 340,000
Advertised network numbers in October, 1992: 7,505
Advertised network numbers in October, 1993: 16,533
Date after which more than half the registered networks were commercial: August, 1991
Number of Internet hosts in Norway, per 1000 population: 5
Number of Internet hosts in United States, per 1000 population: 4
Number of Internet hosts in October, 1993: 2,056,000
Round-trip time from MIT to mcmvax.mcmurdo.gov in McMurdo, Antarctica: 640 milliseconds     Number of hops: 18
Number of Silicon Valley real estate agencies advertising with Internet mail addresses: 1
Terabytes carried by the NSFNET backbone in February, 1993: 5
Number of countries on the Internet: 60
Number of countries reachable by electronic mail: 137 (approx.)
Number of countries not reachable by electronic mail: 99 (approx.)
Date of first National Public Radio program broadcast simultaneously on the Internet: 21 May 1993