In 2000, Moore's law was still going strong and had been for the past 40 years (Dennard scaling not ending until around 2005). At that time it was actually more difficult for people to imagine a future that did not include practically unlimited computing capability. I'm not just talking about the unwashed masses, even many experts and leaders in the silicon industry did not see what was coming - Intel released the Pentium 4 in 2000 and was saying it would scale to 10GHz+ in a few years (https://www.anandtech.com/show/680/6).