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.
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.