The internet was earlier, but there are two other things to remember: in 1971, a computer cost as much as a house, filled a large room, and required a professional operator. The first microprocessors actually came on the market that year and it took time for people to build devices around them or for those devices to hit the mass market. When that happened, you were getting things like text interfaces and keyboards, tiny amounts of storage on cassettes or floppies, etc.
Similarly, in the United States the phone company monopoly and expensive but slow modems meant you were looking at 300bps connectivity tying up an expensive phone line and communicating with someone outside of your immediate area was expensive per-minute charges.
That got better but it really wasn't until the early 90s that GUIs were mainstream and it wasn't until the mid-90s that computer costs had come down enough to make them affordable to the average person. Similarly, modems were pretty slow and limited so the early web was held back by the fact that a lot of people would need 5 minutes to load a web page with a fullscreen 800x600 image.
Demand for the web is what drove a lot of non-techies to buy a computer capable of running something like Windows 95, because they'd heard of things they could do on the web — whether that was educational research, getting software updates without waiting for floppy disks in the mail, following sports, connecting with other people who shared the same hobby, making travel plans, downloading porn, etc. the first web browsers and email clients were driving a lot of people to buy computers so they could use them. ISPs had sprung up all over the country and faster options like DSL and cable modems were game changers for the experience.
This is a start contrast to blockchain technologies which were close to globally available on day one — even in poor countries, there was at least someone with a network-connected PC — but despite a much longer period of time still haven't found much demand because they don't improve the average person's life unless they enjoy speculating on their ability to resell tokens.