people talked about it, people knew about it, some non-tech people already were using it. That's what i meant by "popular" (sorry, non-native, so maybe it isn't the correct word).

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.

Could be talking about Mintel [0] which was a simpler, earlier version of the web

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitel

in 1994-1995 in france, internet was starting to be known from the general public and available to anyone. It was already dubbed as the future in the medias