Caption
As mankind evolved any individual's knowledge was limited to what he could see and do personally. At some point language evolved to the point that humans were able to tell others about things they'd seen and done when away from the group and thereby increase the group's knowledge.
Time passed.
A lot of time passed.
Eventually technology increased step by step until computers were invented with the
ENIAC. Oh yeah, now we're talkin'! Assuming you define "talking" as being done by programming a room-filling computer 1 wire at at time then, yes, they were talking.
More time passed and
ARPANET, what would eventually become the
Internet we know today, was invented by
MIT and
DARPA. Then
Tim Berners-Lee made the leap and invented the
World Wide Web. Now we were
really talking.
While all of this was happening corporate/government-owned room-filling mainframe computers were being supplanted by personal computers for the average person. Then along came
Gordon Moore, Intel co-founder, who postulated. in 1965, that hardware speed would double and cost would halve every 2 years. Since then
Moore's Law, as it's known, has driven the PC industry until today when with a few taps on the screen of my iPad it can not only show me where it is but that I'm standing beside it in Canyon Country Park. While it has more computing power than all of the Apollo spacecraft that went to the Moon, combined, not just the ones that landed on it, it's a waste of computing power when I could simply lift my head and have a look around and see where I am.
Ain't technology grand?
So being on the Internet is like VR ... you're there but you're not, just like me and my iPad.