The WWW that was created to share scientific papers? Or you mean the GP's Internet that was created to organize the US troops on the event of a nuclear strike?
I guess so, there was plenty of people aware they were not toys. Most of those people did use them as toys most of the times, like everybody else at the time, but the toy classification was mostly from uninformed people and trolls.
While working at RAND on a scheme for U.S. telecommunications infrastructure to survive a “first strike,” Paul Baran conceived of the Internet and digital packet switching, the Internet's underlying data communications technology. His concepts are still employed today; just the terms are different. His seminal work first appeared in a series of RAND studies published between 1960 and 1962 and then finally in the tome “On Distributed Communications,” published in 1964.
https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html
Baran's original packet (block) switched networks development papers, and in fact his entire catalogue, are available at RAND:
"On Distributed Communications I. Introduction to Distributed Communications Networks"
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_memoranda/RM3420.html
(This and the others are listed at the first link.)
Most of the citizens of the western world (even those with a degree) definitely pidgeon-hole expensive university projects as "toys", because they don't have one and don't see a need for one.
Academia is a weird place and is often underestimated.
Compuserve, AOL and newsgroups were already big when I discovered the www - Compuserve and newsgroups seemed vastly superior to me at the time.
Netscape Navigator seemed so basic, and how would anyone know which URLs to use (discoverability)? I chuckled, wrote it off, and stuck with what I knew.
Well, I was just a little bit wrong :)
A wonderful 1 minute snippet of David Bowie explaining how huge of a deal it’s going to be to a skeptical interviewer in the 90s
I wonder if you went back to the very earliest days of the WWW, did everyone see it as a toy? Or were there already people (those developing it, perhaps) who saw that it had awesome non-toy potential?
I suspect people brand new tech as "toys" when they're not, and I bet there's also developers that take their toys and call them products :)
Maybe the solution is to completely discard the "toy" / "non-toy" dichotomy. It seems like it just muddies the discussion when the important thing is to evaluate the actual merits of the product/technology in question.