https://www.wired.com/story/30-years-reports-webs-death-are-exaggerated/

As soon as you visit a modern website, it starts feeding you reasons to leave. First by begging you to download its app from the app store, then with a dialog box urging you to sign up for a newsletter. Next will come a request to send you alerts, followed by either an onslaught of ads or a plea to turn your ad blocker off. It's enough to make you swear off the web in favor of podcasts or private Slack channels or apps like Apple News—someplace where you can escape the din of pop-ups and fake news and harassment. If only it were so simple.

Today's web wasn't what Tim Berners-Lee envisioned 30 years ago when he pitched the idea of a "distributed hypertext system" to the European Organization for Nuclear Research, better known as CERN. In his proposal, Berners-Lee described an application he created in 1980 called Enquire to keep track of his software projects. Enquire, he explained, let him create different types of "sheets" that contained information like software documentation. Some sheets could simply be links to other sheets. Wikipedia comes to mind today, but at the time Berners-Lee likened Enquire to the classic text-based game Colossal Cave Adventure (better known as Adventure) and to Apple's Hypercard system.