Report from the Nostalgia Dept.

Someone out there actually set up a site that uses a Commodore 64 as a web server.

While I'm not sure that this provides any significant benefit to the world, it does demonstrate that, technologically, it would have been possible for the internet to establish a presence much earlier than it actually did.

There were plenty of modems, and on-line bulletin boards in the 80s. SGML, the forerunner of HTML, was published in 1980. And there was even a prototype web browser developed by Apple, called Hypercard. Unfortunately, Apple was unable to leverage the potential of the internet back in those days -- their EWorld online service was a disaster.

So why is it that the internet didn't really become a a global phenomenon until the mid-90's?