Big competitor to the web at the time was Gopher.  Then at some point there was a rumour they would charge fees on some of the instances.  At that point everyone switched to the web which had no transaction fees or royalties.  So people get to try the system for free, and later comes the commerce layer.  Tho commercial layer of the web has gone a bit too far.  Hence working on an open web to create a balance. 

 Gopher, Veronica, WAIS, I used them all before the web.

We built data centres in the late 80's - 2000's, we had usenet feeds and all sorts going on.

I've been having a discussion about NTP recently and shocked to see it be superseded by PTP. Apparently we need nano second accurate clocks in our X boxes now 😂  

 you realize that usenet and nostr are a very similar model? 

 No, I've never looked that deep, but now you mention it, I can see the similarities!