Hypertext was 'in the air', Nelson had introduced the idea and there were commercial hypertext systems available. The Gopher protocol was almost there. I think <i>something</i> like the Web would have happened around the time anyway. Sir Tim got there first, and provided half a hypertext system (forward links but no back links until blog systems with track-back) that was 'open' as we would say now. Built on a Unix like system and free for distribution, so low friction on adoption.<p>Only a few sites in the world could/can do the Higgs experiment, and the US decided to leave the game in the 1990s. Therefore I respectfully disagree.<p>Food for thought: what would the Web look like if Microsoft had developed the first public distributed hypertext system?