It's resonable to say that the web caught on outside CERN in 1993, with the release of Mosaic.

(Hands up, anyone else who used to subscribe to the NCSA "What's new on the web" newsletter in 1993 and visit all the new web servers ... before 10am, every morning?)

Yup, and also scrub every new USENET post by 10:10.

That stupid Yanoff List wrecked everything. =)

In 1993, the newsgroups were way too much to read even if that is all a person did, so you must mean using a program to scan the groups for URLs; right?

Google has a fascinating timeline of Usenet news:

(http://www.google.com/googlegroups/archive_announce_20.html)

Even ignoring binary groups a Usenet feed would have been considerable in 1993.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usenet#Usenet_traffic_changes)

Well nobody read every newsgroup, did they?

I had a core list of 4-5 newsgroups that I would check once daily. On a busy day there would be maybe 20-30 new messages per group.

After Eternal September some of those groups went to hundreds daily and got to be too much to cope with in a day.

quite I remember stumbling on a text interface to the www on ITU's gopher server. I remember thinking what cool idea they have implmeted Bushs memex but a text mode vt100 emulation isn't a terribly good interface.

This must have been 92 or possibly 91