Handling video and audio was an improvement brought mostly by computing technology vs. the Internet expanding; I'm fine with a LAN-local archive of music and video (admittedly, using flac/mp3 and bd remux and h264), and a lot of my content was ripped from physical media vs. downloaded. So the streaming services aren't terribly compelling to me.
(Pictures, too -- until the late 1990s, graphics were a pain)
USENET > RSS.
CVS for projects like FreeBSD wasn't particularly worse than GitHub.
gmail is actually inferior to mutt + own mail server in a lot of ways; it's easier to set up.
Google Earth/Maps are awesome, as is google search. Wikipedia is the kind of thing which easily could have existed in the 1990s-style Internet; FAQs were largely the same thing, just structured differently. I'd count it, but I do think a 1990-era Internet would have eventually created some kind of repository of indexed knowledge like Wikipedia.
re: streaming, the value is the instant access to the content. how did you fill up your hard drive? rip DVDs? Pirate it? Totally absurd to say streaming legal content instantly is not compelling vs. the file server/warez approach.
Web based e-mail is obviously superior to setting up your own mail server. Zero-install, access anywhere. I have memories of configuring sendmail and ripping my hair out. You really think this was a superior way of dealing with something as fundamental as e-mail? Nowadays it "just works." In the interim we had ISP hosted mail servers which were always broken, misconfigured, going down, and eating our e-mail. I remember walking on eggshells helping people set up their ISP e-mail knowing that I was one checkbox away ("Leave a copy of e-mail on server") from making it so their entire e-mail history was a hard drive crash from being destroyed permanently.
And don't get me started on OSS source control. Github has transformed the way open source works. CVS (and non DVCSes in general) sucked. The online tools sucked. I still cringe when I get redirected to source forge for a download. A lot of amazing work got done but I'd never want to go back there.
I'm with you that wikipedia "the software" could have been created in the 1990s, but it would have been a barren wasteland without the larger access the web has now. In fact, I'd be shocked if there weren't a handful of attempts to bild an open internet based encyclopedia during that time, and now we have selection bias making us think wikipedia was the first. So what you see there is an example of something that, imho, couldn't exist without wider access to the web. Ie, it's an example of not just better tooling but Internet applications that became enabled by wider access, which is what you seem to have been arguing against actually existing.
(Pictures, too -- until the late 1990s, graphics were a pain)
USENET > RSS.
CVS for projects like FreeBSD wasn't particularly worse than GitHub.
gmail is actually inferior to mutt + own mail server in a lot of ways; it's easier to set up.
Google Earth/Maps are awesome, as is google search. Wikipedia is the kind of thing which easily could have existed in the 1990s-style Internet; FAQs were largely the same thing, just structured differently. I'd count it, but I do think a 1990-era Internet would have eventually created some kind of repository of indexed knowledge like Wikipedia.