[kazinator]

Before the Internet was for hobbyists, it was only for professionals working at companies and institutions hooked up to it.

The window of time between the World Wide Web coming into existence on the Internet, and that Web becoming widely commercialized, was only a handful of years.

I was already doing contract work in 1994 for a pay-per-click commercial website dispensing information about mining sites and stocks around the world. (What back end? I modified CERN httpd's logging routines to look up the page in a hash table of paid content, and log extra information about that. Then a log parsing program would import the data into a billing system.)