The future of the Web, circa May 1995...

I'm sitting on Carl de Cordova's deck in Austin, Texas. We're drinking Shiner Bock beer and pontificating about the future of the web. Carl put the first Apple home page on the web in early 1993, using the UNIX version of Netscape, and the second page was his resume. This is the God's truth. Carl knew anyone and everyone who was anything on the web then, and they knew him. And back then, his home page included links to, you guessed it, every single web page there was. And there'd be about 10-20 new ones a day. Carl followed them all.
So back to his deck... it's already hot — maybe early May. The kind of hot that deodorant was invented for. The kind Texas is famous for, along with incredible BBQ, great people, bluebonnets, and of course, Shiner Bock beer. So Carl says, "You know, I'm afraid the web is going to die. There's just not enough content. We're going need a ten thousand-fold increase in content to make this work. I sure hope we get it, or all this work will go to waste."
Well, the rest is history — there was a millionfold increase in content, and then it really started growing from there... And that was well before Google. So the next time you're pulling up your latest restaurant on Yelp or Urbanspoon, or checking out the Links here, say a little "thank you" to Carl and all those early pioneers whom you probably haven't heard of, who spent collectively zillions of hours making the real Information Super Highway. It was (and continues to be) the game changer of all game changers...
It's not about your computer hardware, or even the software — it's about all the people, who did all that work. Most of them didn't get rich, but like Steve said, they "made the world a better place."