It’s not so simple as saying we have something called computers which are connected to a network of wires. They’d be like, what? Our intuitive understanding of the Internet comes from our understanding of things like photographs, phones, and television.

So, Galileo walks into a bar…

First, we learned of a way to preserve the image projected by a lens.

Then we discovered that many such images, seen quickly in succession, would appear to move.

Then we harnessed the power of lightning. We learned it was a type of liquid which we could transmit things through, like the way sound can travel great distances in bodies of water. Just as water can become a part of the air through boiling, so too could the liquid of lightning become part of the air, and we found a way to take our images, which when strung together and looked at quickly would appear to move, and we turned them into air, so that people with boxes all over the world could see these moving images. These boxes were really just fat framed piece of glass, all the parts making it work residing inside. It would just run through the images we had beamed through the air using electricity. We also found a way to document sound, and so when we synced up the sounds to the moving images, it looked like the people were as alive as they appear to us now.

This was about seventy years after we learned of a way to transmit voices using the power of lightning through wires which we strung between cities and homes in a vast fisherman’s web of connections.
(// Q: But why explain TV?
A: Because you need to get them to imagine things moving on glass screens.)

So, we’d found a way to make things move on pieces of glass, using the power of lightning. And we had this network of lines through which we could talk to one another. It took some work but we found a way to hook up the two, and so in the eventually we had these pieces of framed super-glass hooked up to this network, and the glass displays whatever we want on it – printing type, paintings, our mechanic images so described above (which we call ‘photographs’ which is just a pretentious was of saying ‘light drawing’). They are like windows only we can chose what to see through them.