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As late as December 1991 belief in Tim-Berners Lee's World Wide Web idea was low enough that a paper he submitted on the subject to the Hypermedia '91 conference in San Antonio, TX was bumped down to a poster session. (Poster session bumpees of the world unite!). html 
There's a likely apocryphal story that the paper was rejected for a full session because of concerns over scalability. That said, it's possible -- the World Wide Web's lack of a central database did mean that scalability could be accomplished much easier, but it also meant it was going to be messy.