And AT&T had their (in)famous Picturephone way back in the 60s. But none of that is relevant or important here. Most people had nowhere near the bandwidth to ma

And AT&T had their (in)famous Picturephone way back in the 60s. But none of that is relevant or important here. Most people had nowhere near the bandwidth to make video chat usable. Internet connections of the late 90 were absolutely not enough to support collaborative editing: the latency was just far too high, and more often than not connections were just not reliably enough, never mind that a huge section of people were on dial-up and paying by the minute (and many didn't have internet at all). This really was a matter of actually having a critical mass of people with the hardware to do $stuff. Yes, all of this was "technically possible" a long time ago but a bunch of people in a research project isn't a market. After that things kind of sorted themselves out.