But wherever the idea came from, it was an exceedingly potent one—as potent, in its own way, as the idea of an open marketplace guided by Adam Smith's Invisible Hand, or the idea of an open democracy in which all human beings are created equal. If you wanted to be a part of the Internet, you could be: it would be open to anyone willing to deal in the common currency and/or speak the common language, as defined by the interface standard. It was this architecture of openness that would enable the Internet to undergo its explosive growth in the 1990s, when it would expand from a handful of users
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