Just to add to that, coming to a full-blown TCP/IP connection from dialup was mind-altering. When I was a young teenager, I started using BBSes in the early 1990's. With those, there was not really a notion of doing several things at once. If you were downloading some file, you couldn't browse around and post to message boards or anything in the meantime. If a download was happening (ahh ZMODEM, oh how we loved thee), that was all you could do. Full stop. I distinctly remember the first time I discovered I could launch Netscape <i>and</i> be using FTP at the same time. It took a while to get accustomed to the fact that multiple things could go over my connection without me having to worry they would stomp all over each other. Now I can't imagine things working any other way. I'd bet that most people just slightly older than I am have no idea this was ever the case.
Calling Yahoo a startup that begat the search engine is glossing over a HUGE chunk of early web history.<p>Scott Yanoff's list was the real origin of the web directory, which led to Filo and Yang's YAHOO list (yes, it's a backronym)