I was deeply involved with BBS software development at the time, and after 2 years of futzing with ANSI graphics, the whole BBS community was looking for a new terminal paradigm, something that would (finally!) allows us to display pictures (porn?), change fonts, and even stream video (oh, the raw ambition).
Back then, your modem dialer was also your software terminal (yeah, makes perfect sense right?). Soft terminals emulated popular-but-limited UNIX-based hard terminals like VT52 or VT100 etc. Remember, software used to be EXPENSIVE because, of course, memory was expensive!
Oh yeah, Hypercard...so I remember discussing the problem with my partner, Tim Stark, and the folks at Galacticomm, the BBS company we worked with. Someone mentioned Hypercard as an almost ideal paradigm for building a frontend that allowed for hot-linking of text, graphics, and sound.
We actually built basic hypercard functionality into our flagship product, Magisearch, that I still contend was one of the very first online search engines ever created for general purpose online searching. We quickly realized that since we already had the indexes built for all the documents, or pages, we could quickly scan the returned text and highlight any already indexed words and "link" them.
Then one day, a true programming genius (I unfortunately cannot remember his name this morning, and thats a shame because he deserves full credit for his efforts) dropped a floppy on my desk and said "run it"...and up came a hybrid dialer/BROWSER!
This guy had done it!! I can't remember what he called the product, but I'll never forget the date...January 19th, 1993...my mom's birthday. Our BBSes were finally going to have rich text capabilities...hyperstacks!
And then came January 23rd and I product I DO remember the name of, Mosaic, dropped, signalling the end for BBS's and my software business.