a teletype over a phone line is more like morse code on a telegraph line (century old technology) than it is like the modern internet. I suppose if the signal were ‘digital’ then that is the transformative key, but there is a reason that even the guys who did it at the time didn’t make much of it. The concept was not as novel as we view it in hind sight. It’s just like the idea of cell phones was not that crazy. People had been using two way radios and relays for a long time. Again, it’s more about the complexity of how traffic is routed that transformed things, and digital packeting of data is how that was accomplished
True, I remember using a teletype for weather and news at the radio station I worked for decades ago.