When I wrote this article as the electronics editor of Popular Mechanics, the Web was just six years old. Dial-up connections ruled. There was no Google, no Facebook, no Wikipedia, no YouTube, no Twitter. There was no Hulu, no Spotify, no Instagram. There was no Cloud computing. There were no smartphones. Netflix was founded that year, but as a rent-by-mail DVD company, not the internet behemoth it is now, slinging trillions of bits over the Net every day—hundreds of thousands times the total internet traffic of 1997.
Back then, the internet was used mainly for email, news groups, and to access the relative handful of websites that were around, like book-seller Amazon, eBay, and the Yahoo, Lycos, and Excite portals. Was the internet dying? No. That was hyperbole. But it…