Yes, of course. Back in the early days of the interwebs though no one really knew how big it would get though or what the future would be. At the time it would have been just another small incidental thing to tack onto an existing big publishing deal.
Was how big ever a question? The speed with which consumer connection speeds increased way beyond a dialup modem, enabling streaming and other high data content, might have surprised you. The exact form things took might have surprised you. Was the general direction ever a surprise?
Depends on how far back you go. In order...
I remember email bang addressing, and the pain it caused.
I remember seeing if there was anything new by going to cern.ch.
I remember there being a "best of web" competition. This was one of the winners, although back then the line drawing maps were from the Xerox map server.
I remember using altavista, yahoo (even at the beginning, it was obvious curated lists weren't going to be sufficiently scalable) and google.edu. Google was good then.
I remember Amazon selling CDs and books, and thinking that selling shoes/clothes was a stupid concept.
I remember being 25% responsible for an ecommerce site that won one of the Financial Times competition categories in 1999. (Yeah. I'm shameless
)
But I don't remember the kremvax hoax