Did it though? Sure, the base protocol (TCP/IP) has mostly been unchanged up until IPv6, but the early implementations had plenty of bugs and limitations. And the goals solved were less clear back then as well, especially when BBS etc somewhat directly solved the problem of "get some data from another party without leaving your house" quite simply. Remember, there was once a time where there was no standardized image format on the internet. Hence, why Gopher was a contender to replace HTTP. It really took until the late 90s that most people realized how much it could be used for.. and it took until the late 2000s before most of those radical uses could be realized into something practical (ie, online shopping once seemed like a strange thing you'd only want for niche items... but now Amazon exists).
And beyond that, when the internet first became a real thing outside of researchers, it required pretty intimate knowledge of the technology to properly connect to it and get it to work. Remember that operating systems use to not include a TCP/IP stack for instance. It would be a long complicated process to get your computer to actually connect to the internet... but now, in 2017, for the most part all you do is say "connect to <accesspoint> with password XXXX" and it magically works. Right now I think this is parallel to blockchains. It takes a lot of technical knowledge to really use smart contracts and blockchain tech right now, but I imagine a future where it is no more difficult than logging into your bank account, or writing an Excel macro.
with the difference that internet worked exactly as planned from the beginning, had a clear goal and solved a real problem.