[kenjackson]

If it makes them feel any better, I told people in the 90s that the WWW didn't make sense because we already have telnet, archie, gopher, veronica, and ftp. What can WWW give me when I already have those tools to connect with...

[kmeisthax]

In this case, Gopher was a ticking time bomb, as the University of Minnesota was looking to charge money for the server implementation. Tim Berners-Lee was adamant about keeping WWW open and got CERN to agree to release it as public domain. Dropbox has a similar advantage, at least for me: it's not tied to a particular OS vendor or office suite. I can run it on basically anything and have first-class access to all of my files.

[nine_k]

In 1993 that was true. In 1998 it was starkly different, due to the advent of DOM, and JavaScript to manipulate it.

[kenjackson]

I said this either in late 93 or early 94. I was in a class when someone demo'ed Lynx to me, and I tore into it and the WWW. Looking at the timeline it seems that Mosaic came out right after Lynx, but my memory of it has Mosaic coming out way after Lynx. And it seemed like Navigator years after that, but the real history is super compressed. By the time I'd seen Mosaic, I was then pretty convinced of its utility.