For pure institutional memory from primary source. I went to the archives and read a lot of the posts on comp.infosystems.www.announce circa 1990-1994. Origins of Mosaic. Glory days at CERN. And that day had its share of cranks. Perhaps 25% of the populations ;)

But even the cranks had a certain elan. The made up private research centers in the email sigs were optimistic: Paragon Institute of Cyber Consciousness, and such

Whats interesting about IRC, with xdcc peer to peer file transfers, it already acted as a distributed peer brokerage back in the mid 1990s. Trying to bootstrap a laer like that today requires enormous overhead