alt Hacker Newsi want to meet those people who did this originally in 1989 and to ask them, did they ever think it would be this today?
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It wasn't a rocket science amazing idea in 1989. It was a pretty obvious thing anyone in the space could see would be interesting to try -- hypertext already existed. The internet was just taking off. The idea that you could host pages that hyperlinked to each other on the internet was totally obvious and if you'd explained it to anyone active in the internet at the time (obviously not that many of those people), they'd have nodded. I should add that almost nobody had a computer with a graphics display in 1989 (I did, at work) so that further constrains the set of folk to whom the idea would make sense. The fact that everyone now has many 64-bit computers with extremely high resolution displays is probably the more surprising thing to 1989-dude.
The original WWW proposal is quite easy and interesting to read through: https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
Part of the original requirements was the decentralized nature, which I always found extra interesting:
> CERN Requirements - Non-Centralisation - Information systems start small and grow. They also start isolated and then merge. A new system must allow existing systems to be linked together without requiring any central control or coordination.
Doesn't directly answer your question I suppose, but gives at least one perspective on how at least one person saw it at that point :)