I'm pretty sure Virginia Wolf talked about plucking information down from some sort of Web (her words). Did any futurists, science writers, sociologists get close? Or was the event truly unforeseeable prior to its advent?
Edit: I'm seeing 1 in the reply count but nothing is there. Means poster is shadowbanned FYI.
The book A Brief History of the Future by John Naughton has a whole chapter on this. It seems that the clearest vision on the internet in terms of actually being a realistic device was the 'Memex' as envisioned by Vannevar Bush in his article As We May Think (which you can read here).
The article was published in 1945, and describes a machine in which people can compress and store all of their records, books, and communication. Importantly, it describes creating a trail of links which can be shared with others to create associations between topics. This is of course the crux of what makes the Internet useful and is quite clearly described in the article. It also envisions other related technologies such as computers, speech recognition and even Wikipedia - 'Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified'.