This is quite funny - but all those making fun of Katie and Bryant are a bit off-base with their cutting remarks. I very much doubt most of them knew anything about the internet, much less the WWW at that point (January 1994). At the end of 1993, AOL had 600,000 subscribers - by mid-1994, CompuServe had 2,000,000, but in January 1994, the WWW was still in its infancy and these were closed networks, not the web as we know it today. It wasn't until May of 1994 that CompuServe erected its first home page. The internet wasn't graphical at that point - it was largely text, in the form of bulletin boards etc. Mosaic (which became Netscape) was released in early 1993, with releases for Apple and Windows by the fall of '93. Mosaic Netscape 0.9 didn't come out until the fall of 1994.
Mosaic was written on a NeXT - my husband (then an assistant prof at Oregon State in Electrical Engineering) had one and I do remember him insisting on my coming down to his office to see this wondrous thing called the "world wide web" in the spring of 1993. At the time, it was a little hard to understand the excitement - there certainly weren't very many web sites out there (by the fall of 1993 there were 200 known web servers in the WORLD) and while the world of computer bulletin boards was intriguing, it could be very difficult to find anything in particular unless you knew where to look. There were no search engines quite like Google, that's for sure! I do remember using Gopher and Lycos...
Anyway, here's a far funnier quote from Bill Gates (who SHOULD have known more than Katie and company!):
"The Internet? We are not interested in it"
- Bill Gates, 1993
Of course, in a lovely bit of revisionism,
"We had planned to integrate a Web browser with our operating system as far back as 1993"
- Microsoft (27 Jul 1998, filing its first court responses to federal antitrust)
He also said:
"Sometimes we do get taken by surprise. For example, when the Internet came along, we had it as a fifth or sixth priority."
- Bill Gates, Jul, 1998
So which is it?
