Unless a computer display can become more like a book in its many features we shall continue to need paper. Their aim was for a system that would still allow communication to take place even though enemy action had disabled parts of it. The Internet depends on packet-switching. Meanwhile, at the University of Hawaii a network of computers on islands were linked over the seas via random access broadcast radio. Through a link with Xerox's research lab PARC came the idea of such a system over coaxial cable, with the added advantage of early collision detection.
Ethernet is dominant for LANs.
The other technology that was needed was a set of protocols that could be used over different hardware and operating systems. Having such widely accepted and adopted non-proprietary protocols is important for the spread of the Internet. The history of hypertext goes back to the dawn of the modern computer age. Sun had an impromptu review of what it was doing and this began a project codenamed Green. They were designing software to run in devices that most people would not think of as having any compute power.