In October 1994 a Wired journalist registered mcdonalds.com and then tried to give it to Mcdonalds, but couldn't reach anyone who understood the importance of domain name registration: https://archive.is/tHaea
In my recollection it really wasn't til 1998-2001 or so that people (where I lived in the southern U.S. anyway) really started to take notice.
His parents weren’t comp-science researcher, he just liked tech, and « had internet ». it was already popular amongst the general public.
On the other side, my mother once worked in a comp science research department, and she once brought me to the lab, where people would create me an email. That was something around 1990. She told me « they’re all crazy with that internet thing ». i never used that email, i didn’t even understand what that was, pretty much nobody in the general audience did. Being able to predict that it would be big at that time maybe would have been prescient, although it was already the consensus amongst people in the field.
No it wasn’t, not by the normal definition of “popular”. It was less than 1% of the population.
What i mean is that it wasn't some bleeding edge tech only a few people in the elite knew about. Everybody already knew that was the future.
But just "internet" doesn't mean a lot. Prescient would have been predicting search, ads and social media. We now are in a similar position maybe, with some tech that looks cool, trying to build geocities with AI
And that's just for the www. People were using BBS, FTP, email and newsgroup before that.
There were million of AOL customers in 1995, but most of them used AOL only to access web sites on the internet and send and receive SMTP email.
Getting back to the original topic, by 1995 there were hundreds of mainstream journalists who where predicting in their published output that the internet will quickly become an important part of society. It was the standard opinion among those that had an opinion on the topic.
Heck, Mosaic wasn't even in development in 1990. It was released in late 1993, and it wasn't until Navigator was released in 1994 that "browsing" became a thing. Most people before then weren't going to use an FTP site off an obscure college to DL something originally intended for X windows...
People forget how fast the Web took off at that point. From 1994 to 1999, the growth was just crazy, with improvements in features every six months.
By 1996, we were up to five million users, and Steve Case gave everyone in the company a special company jacket as a bonus. I still have mine, although it hasn't fit me in a couple of decades.
Even as late as 1997 (when I left), most AOL users were still in the "walled garden". Sure, we were the biggest Internet e-mail provider in the world, but that was still just a small fraction of the total AOL users. AIM was much more popular than e-mail. Advances were being made in efficiently distributing AIM chat messages efficiently that would not be exceeded in the outside world until the advent of BitTorrent.
However, by 1997, I think we did have more users coming into AOL over the Internet and their local ISP, as opposed to through our own modem banks. That was in part due to the "unlimited" plans that AOL rolled out, but the telephone calls themselves would have to be paid for if the user dialed non-local POPs for our modem banks, and many of our modem banks were totally overloaded.
AOL's big "hockey stick" moment was in 1995, sure. But the "hockey stick" moment for the Internet was at least a year or two later.
Not really. I was very active on the internet starting around 1989 and what it was going to become was very clear to the people using it even at that time.
That memo would have been prescient if made 5 years before.