This blog post is actually a good indicator of how ephemeral web applications are. The blog post contains a reference to some "Snipshot" webapp. But the domain is dead now, and it's impossible to get the software. It's even hard to see how the software ever looked like.

In contrast, we can all install Lotus 1-2-3 on today's machines, via emulation.

Writing webapps is writing something that will never exist in the future. At some point in time the server will be turned off, and nobody will see your work.