My first year of computer science (or any university course) was in 1997. I had used a Commodore 64, Sinclair ZX81, etc in the 80s, then a break in Junior High and High School, and for several years after that, and gotten back into computers as a hobby in the mid-90s. For health reasons, I could no longer work as a cook, had been learning C from K&R's book to make it easier to build ray tracing animations, and decided to go to university for it (I had some money saved up by virtue of having no free time or social life).

I sat down a to a Sun workstation that was described as a "thin client". This was slicker than my Linux system at home (which I mostly ran as a terminal using Lynx or something to browse the web) and featured the Sun browser and blinding fast Internet. Since I was using dial up at home, this was pretty intense.

Yes, I believed the future was thin clients, web browsers for everything, and that hyper-connected devices were just around the corner. It seemed totally reasonable to me that every system would be like a Chromebook. You sit down, login, and your "system" is waiting for you just as you left it the last time you used it whether it was here, or across the world. I also imagined this experience working on your watch (I imagined a bigger watch - we had watches that you could watch TV on in the 80's - a kid in my school had one) or on what I imagined were inevitable table-top and wall sized monitors that I assumed would be ubiquitous in 10 years (surface hub comes to mind).

So this was a popular vision and one that is kind of realized today although not all the way and not quite in the way "we" (people I was reading, talking to, and hoping to become) imagined.