W. Richard Stevens' _TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1_ dedicates a grand total of four lines of text to the World Wide Web. He devoted more space to something called Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computerized Archives).

That's one of the many reasons his books are true classics and works of genius.

That said, there is no mention of IRC in the whole thing, and NNTP only appears in a table without any significant detail added, which goes to show that geniuses make mistakes too.