[ub]

I had attended a talk by Vint Cerf at Stanford where he had posited that the reason the web took off was because people could see the HTML source of websites and start writing their own HTML.This, he believed, led to the exponential growth of web content. So, I guess then, "view source" was quite common.

[madcaptenor]

That's definitely true, speaking as someone who learned HTML in '96 or 97 mostly by reading other people's HTML source.