ZDNet:

I used the Internet for years before there was a Web, but when Tim Berners-Lee proposed the Web, an Internet-based hypertext system, to his boss at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, we didn’t know it but we were on the brink of a revolution.

Berners-Lee’s idea wasn’t new. You can trace it back to Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think article in July 1945. Personally, I think Ted Nelson’s 1960 Xanadu hypertext vision had even more influence on how the Web would turn out. And, of course, Apple’s HyperCard did give us a hypertext system that might have beat Berners-Lee to the Web… except HyperCard was totally network unaware.

The door was open for Berners-Lee to turn the hypertext dream into our Web reality.

Hard to believe it wasn’t that long ago. Us old folks will remember what it was like accessing the internet before the World Wide Web. You kids nowadays don’t know the struggles we had using Archie, Gopher and Mosaic.