Jame Fallows sends us to Mark Bernstein:
Something Entertaining, If You're Feeling Smart: Students of Web phenomenon are naturally tempted to regard the Web as part of Nature, that it unfolds as it always has and, more or less, as it ought or must. But the Web is still new, and quite recently it was entirely possible to envision that the World Wide Web would be quite different from the Web we know. As late as 1993, for example, expert consensus held that the cost of persuading a core of writers and publishers to contribute a small library's worth of information to a public docuverse might be a mere trillion dollars; not only was the estimate quantitatively off target, but the sign was wrong...
