Something to keep in mind is that a modern web page would be virtually unusable by the standards of 2002 and a 1995 web page would have been virtually unusable without the "click here" links. Conventions have to be established. While those blue underlined links may have had some precedent among some computer users (e.g. many help systems of the era used colored text to highlight hyperlinks), they would have little meaning to someone who bought their first computer to get on that newfangled Internet thingy. So while I agree that they were a bad thing over all, they were a necessary stopgap.