It was clear that the WWW was a good idea but it clearly wouldn’t succeed because of the foolish decision not to have back links. But it might gain a bit of traction and make people receptive for the real thing. I attended more than one significant academic conference in the early 90s where this belief was uttered to general agreement. People had even already experienced broken links and yet couldn’t put 2 and 2 together.

I also wanted bidirectional links even though I was a Lisp programmer! In case it’s not clear, one way links was an inspired decision.

Another belief, in the latter part of the 90s, was that decent web search was basically impossible as someone would have to store a copy of the whole thing, which is clearly impossible.