Oh, agreed. And when I started using the WWW in 01992 it was obvious that it was going to be a huge thing. But "visual paradigms already known from early-90s multimedia apps" is mutually exclusive with "they could not show text and images side by side". HyperCard, PowerPoint, and other "early-90s [or late-80s] multimedia apps" showed text and images side by side incessantly. Or sometimes on top of each other.

There was "another software that let you click on a link representing a file on another computer possibly on the other side of the planet, download it and show it to you in (almost) real time"; specifically, Gopher, which came out at the same time as WWW.

Can you elaborate on what you're saying about Word 4.0 for Macintosh?