Why did the word "Internet" change from a noncount to count noun?

I remember a time back in 1993 - 1994 for a couple months at our university the Internet was used as a noncount noun, so we would say:

Do you have Internet at your university?

In fact, the Internet has a lot of similarities to electricity and we would say:

Do you have electricity in your house?

But gradually other people just started to say "the Internet" and so our little group at the university followed suit and never thought about it again.

Does anyone remember any official journalistic decision on this, or was our group just an early anomaly?

Solution 1:

As a point of reference, when people say "The Internet" they are referring to a specific network. When it was first created people used to differentiate between "The Internet" and "an internet" because there were lots of different internets but one of them was special.

In my personal experience people have more recently started saying "Do you have Internet?" because there is only one Internet worth talking about and its existence is assumed, and it has reached the status of a basic utility, like water or electricity or cable. But "Do you have Internet" is equivalent to saying "Do you have Internet access", and not equivalent to "Do you have The Internet?" which sounds odd, as if you're asking if I possess the Internet.

Solution 2:

I've only ever heard "the internet" and "internet access" used that way, but I have heard other networks such as "NIPRnet" used that way.