I think it was 1992 that TBL was going around selling the WWW to different organizations. That's the year I worked on MIT's TechInfo, similar to gopher. TechInfo had great tools for information providers, but it was still an uphill battle getting departments to keep their info up-to-date. Since the WWW required a lot more knowledge and effort, it seemed hopeless to think you could ever base a campus-wide information system on it.

I didn't see TBL's pitch myself at that time, but the senior people on the project did, and they showed me the lame terminal browser. NeXT was the only graphical browser available. I agreed with them that hypertext was too unstructured. Give it to regular people and you'd have chaos.

When Mosaic introduced the IMG tag and people could actually embed images in hypertext, that's when the demos started to get impressive and the web took off.

A previous manager of mine used to work at AT&T in the early 90s and according to her, AT&T was convinced that gopher was the future. The web was too disorganized to be of much use.

I was working for a project at Chicago that partnered with some other project at CERN, so we saw it pretty early. This perspicacious understanding of technology trends I displayed may well have much to do with my current ramen and water diet and my distinct lack of super-villian hollowed-out volcano headquarters.

No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame.