The daily life changed for most of the people by the scale of the modern technology, but the previous generations were already familiar with the concepts we consider recent.
- In the time of Napoleon France already had an operational telegraph service. That was even before the electricity could be used for it:
"reducing the communication time between North America and Europe from ten days – the time it took to deliver a message by ship – to a matter of minutes."
So even then the people were absolutely able to understand the "internet." Not in the terms of the infrastructure, but in the terms of the effect. In the terms of infrastructure, even the people of today who don't directly work on that mostly use some simplifications, if they are even aware of the technical details of what is actually involved:
The "series of tubes" (from 2006) is just one of possible analogies, which can even be good enough for some scenarios (e.g. when discussing the throughput being limited by the capacity of the installed cables).
I was mostly thinking of the science fictional trope of all mankind's knowledge being in a centralized thing-- e.g. Encyclopedia Galactica. For both societal and technical reasons (especially golden age) SF was often oriented towards benevolent centralized governments.
Sure, they might not have predicted the extent to which knowledge could be "small pieces, loosely joined", but I'm not sure that in every case they are were creating centralized structures from first principles--generally there is one new concept they are exploring/pushing, and everything else is just rebranded things from their everyday life. The Encyclopedia Galactica is nothing more or less than "The Britanica.... IN SPACE!!!!" with no more or less authority implied.
That being said, the general concept of knowledge in earlier sci-fi does seem curiously impoverished--everything worth knowing often can be held within the brain single computer/robot/polymath, or quickly established by proceeding axiomatically from a few observations.
- In the time of Napoleon France already had an operational telegraph service. That was even before the electricity could be used for it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semaphore_telegraph
- The first transatlantic telegraph cable became operational in 1858, that was 160 years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable
"reducing the communication time between North America and Europe from ten days – the time it took to deliver a message by ship – to a matter of minutes."
So even then the people were absolutely able to understand the "internet." Not in the terms of the infrastructure, but in the terms of the effect. In the terms of infrastructure, even the people of today who don't directly work on that mostly use some simplifications, if they are even aware of the technical details of what is actually involved:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_of_tubes
The "series of tubes" (from 2006) is just one of possible analogies, which can even be good enough for some scenarios (e.g. when discussing the throughput being limited by the capacity of the installed cables).