Back in the 90s, at least in the UK, it wasn't called "big tech"; and it wasn't a major part of our direct culture as a family home might have one personal computer if they were well off but it wasn't all that important.

I suspect that even today you'd have a hard time finding a random person on the street who even knows that Oracle is a company and not a character from The Matrix or ancient Greek mythology. And if you tell them they bought Sun they'll think you mean the newspaper, if you talk about Java they'll either think you mean the island or are talking about a brand of coffee.

> around the same time Google lost their innocence and dropped the "Don't be evil" clause

When did that happen? It's still there.

Back in 2018 [1], at a similar time that there was a lot of moving about and restructuring. I think this is about the time that Google search started going downhill as well

[1] https://gizmodo.com/google-removes-nearly-all-mentions-of-do...

Again, the phrase was not dropped. You might notice that your link is titled "Google removes nearly all mentions of don't be evil from its code of conduct". (By which they mean 3 mentions.)

But as that article notes, they didn't drop the phrase. It's there now. It's always been there. There was never a time when they dropped it.