This may be a bit before your time, but "back in the day" we used gopher for our online document (i.e. text file) browsing and distribution. The web/http exist

This may be a bit before your time, but "back in the day" we used gopher for our online document (i.e. text file) browsing and distribution. The web/http existed, but the text-mode clients were a bit more difficult to use than the gopher clients (interesting factoid to consider: gopher was introduced _after_ the first http clients, but until Mosaic hit the scene it was the dominant tool for online text/document navigation.) The data, primitive though it may seem to most people now, was already online and in use but was not being accessed via http browsers. When the first GUI web browsers hit the scene they provided a significant improvement over the text-mode gopher/http clients everyone was using so the uptake was very rapid. If the GUI web browsers could not deal with existing gopher protocol and document-space I doubt they would have taken off as fast as they did.