You're correct. 1985 is too late to stop the internet as the PC boom has begun. I should have written 30 or 35 years instead.
Of course, the underlying point was still there even if the numbers didn't add up.
Ask your dad what he whether he thought to internet was inevitable or even thought about the internet at all in 1980 or 1975 when personal computers were kits which required soldering, when the few graphics user interfaces that existed required light pens, and when the ball mouse was a nearly forgotten toy sitting in a Xerox lab.
Actually, my father and I have had several conversations about it and, as he explained it to me, a whole lot of people were already working on the basis for the Internet long before he went to work for GTE in 1972.
My father pointed out to me that one of the things has to be remembered is that while the consumer component caused the Internet's exponential expansion, it was by no means it's point of origin or reason for being.
Telecom and computer researchers were already looking for ways build computer networks in the '60s. In the '70s they were looking to create an interchange between those networks and make the networks faster and more powerful.
By the mid-80's the Internet can actually be said to exist in it's original intended form: science, business, communications, information services, etc... all starting to link up on an increasingly globalized scale.
In
that context, 1980 or even 1975 isn't even too soon to see an Internet (as the term was first coined in 1974) as an inevitability as entire industries, universities and governments around the globe were working towards that very goal.
Now, that very Internet becoming consumer driven and available in every home?
Nobody was considering
that in 1980. It would have seemed too ASB
even to mention in 1980 or before even 1985 at the earliest.
The technology wasn't there yet. Wide spread computer literacy wasn't there yet. So many factors weren't in place yet that the Internet, as we know it today, is ASB come to life. There's no other way to put it.
Five years.
It only took a span of five years for all of that to change.
1985 is really THE year, as my dad and most of his colleagues saw it, because by then you had the introduction of hypertext and hypertext transfer protocols, DOS Maxthink and other similar programs, a major explosion in the home computer market, faster modems, increases in bandwidth availability, the introduction of computers into the classroom- in many places, as early as kindergarten- and the beginnings of the proliferation of on-line activity by users outside the labs, offices, universities, etc... along with the beginnings of parity of the very technology entering the home with what was being used in offices and labs (Mac, Atari ST, Amiga, PC/AT and it's clones, etc...), and the beginnings of subscription BBS services (like Compuserve) rising steadily all creating the environment into which the Internet as we think of it today would be created.
Hell, before the decade was out, the seeds of what we know today as the Internet, AOL, The World, Prodigy, etc...were already in people's homes with their own primitive forms of browsing for things we see today as Internet staples: news, weather, shopping (albeit, if I recall correctly, only on Prodigy and only through Sears) and some other sundries.
So, to sum up:
Internet
as originally conceived: Viewed as an inevitability well before 1975 because entire industries and governments were working on building it.
Internet
as what it is today: an Internet of chat boards, on-line gaming, shopping, media exchange, and all the consumer and leisure applications we associate with it today, in every home?
Not until 1985 at the earliest and an example of ASB as reality.