Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries is a good resource on this topic. The way it worked beginning in the 80s was that once you had your local in-country r

Eden Medina's Cybernetic Revolutionaries is a good resource on this topic. The way it worked beginning in the 80s was that once you had your local in-country research network, you eventually felt compelled to hook it up to NSFNET (maybe after starting out with an email gateway into ARPANET/CSNET). So it's likely that there would have been just one Internet anyway.