I remember hearing about the "Cornell is WIRED" memo at the time, back in the 90s. That memo was in 1994 and it woke Microsoft up to the potential of open interconnected networks based on standard technologies, as against the proprietary siloed dial-up services like AOL and Compuserve that dominated at the time. I remember reading contemporary articles by Jerry Pournelle about the information utilities that we would all subscribe to. Silos were considered to be the future.
Meanwhile academic networks were building the real future, but it wasn't quite there yet. Early services were built on either completely unstructured single-purpose tools like FTP and Telnet, or hierarchical systems like Usenet and Gopher. Web Browsers did exist, but the interconnected webs of documents was only just getting going, and web applications were still in the future.
A year later Bill's first edition of his book, The Road Ahead, only mentioned the World Wide Web in passing and didn't see it as particularly significant, but even in the few months it took for it to be edited, laid out and printed the situation had changed. Internet services of all kinds had been on an exponential growth curve for a few years, but the exponent for the web was so high that in those months the book became obsolete and even early reviewers knew it.
It was an incredible time to be on the internet. I was lucky enough to have used Janet, the UK Joint Academic Network and our equivalent of ARPANET, in the late 80s. I had a telnet account into a University from work in the 90s, and first accessed web sites using a terminal based browser called Lynx.
The Cornell memo is important because it shows how disconnected communities of technologists were back then. If you were on the Internet and using Gopher and the Web, the growth rate and explosion of new resources and services was obvious. It was every day. You couldn't understand how people in Microsoft or IBM didn't realise what was going on. I was on both - 'state of the art' proprietary business networks at work and the nascent Internet. If you weren't on the internet at the time, what was actually happening was inconceivable.
Even years later I watched gobsmacked in 2000 when AOL bought Time Warner. It was just staggering to me, and many other like me, that anyone credibly though AOL was at all still relevant. But the seeds of that irrelevance were being planted and growing green shoots even back in 1994 in places like Cornell. It really was a pivotal moment.