Sometime in the early 1980s, I came across Ted Nelson's Computer Lib / Dream Machines.  The book had two covers and was to be read in two directions, with the more staid presentation going forward, the more revolutionary coming the other way.

He was on about hypertext and Project Xanadu.  This was all before Tim Berners-Lee and the invention of HTTP at CERN.

I was living in Jersey City at the time, teaching high school in a Catholic academy for young women.  I'd also read Murry Turroff's The Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer and was convinced that we were on the brink of a communications revolution. 

Bucky Fuller's Grunch of Giants came out around the same time (1983), anticipating the same thing ("networks and networking") even as the last vestiges of nationalism were fading quickly. 

"The USA we have known is now bankrupt and extinct" wrote Bucky (discussing the bankruptcy) thereafter to receive a Medal of Freedom from then president Reagan.

I managed to snag a guest account on the New Jersey Institute of Technology account so I could be an early participant in technology later offered through the Institute for Global Communications. 

I continued with IGC networking after moving to Portland in 1985, using a dial-up modem from SE Rhine Street (near Aladdin Theater). I was also engaged with Action Linkage devised by Robert Theobald, a manual postal system based version of the Listserv [tm].

The World Wide Web (WWW) exploded after that, accompanied by the PC, free software, and smart phone revolutions, bringing up to 2012 and this posting.  I currently work for the O'Reilly School of Technology and do my work using the Web.