Thinking about the WWWs 15th birthday
Summary: The Web is amazing, unlikely, and likely wouldn't be the open-ended thing it is today if it's early popularity hadn't made it grow far faster than corporations and policymakers could notice and get their hands in.

I distinctly remember Christmas shopping in December 1993 and seeing a fat book about exploring the World Wide Web. I was familiar with the internet from using Gopher for research, Telnet to log into backgammon and card game servers to play online, Usenet to read the R.E.M. newsgroups, and email to correspond with the few friends who also had an account, but the Web was just another internet space to me. I used Lynx, an all text browser, at the library on the small orange text on black background terminals. I knew about Lycos and Yahoo, and that was about it. Then I opened this book about exploring the web with Mosiac, the new browser with images, and that changed everything.