I remember doing an internship for a big science magazine around that timeframe. They wanted to launch a sort of online encyclopedia for science. They were puzzling over how they were going to get the content to fill the site. "What if", i suggested, "you let the users write the articles?".
Oh, and one of the first things i did on the web was help a friend build a fan website for a band. I was writing the pages in a text editor, and it got a bit repetitive updating the links in the footer on each page when we added a new page. So i wrote a little program that read a general template for the pages, written in HTML with some special markup for where the variable bits should go, and then a file full of the content for each page (in something like a key-value format, i think), and wrote out the HTML for it all. It didn't run on the server, because we didn't have the ability to do that. It just generated a static site.
They didn't think that would work.