Yes and no Max. Back then people were more civil in public discourse and there was no social media to amplify angry voices, no way that anyone other than "experts" had a voice, period. So everything was anecdotal.

But plenty of people thought the internet was stupid and the promises--shopping in your underwear--were things no one wanted. Remember that even with a new super-fast 14.4 modem, it could take 15 minutes (and several failed attempts) to actually log on to Prodigy to check the score of the previous night's Mets game. So many people saw it as overpromise and couldn't wrap their heads around the notion that what took 15 minutes in 1994 would be more or less instant in 2024.

Or to put it in more basic terms, late night talk show hosts got a lot of mileage from jokes about how "that internet thing" was nothing but a waste of time.