I passed my high school exam in 1996, in france, and a friend of mine who had internet gave me the topic for the history exam a day before.
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.
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.
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
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.