The internet and the World Wide Web are niche technologies. Email and web browsing will remain specialized tools.

In the fall of 1994, the web had roughly 10,000 sites. Most were institutional, university departments, government agencies, research labs. Browsing required patience and technical facility. The dominant tool for navigation was Gopher, a text-only menu system that predated the web. If you graduated in 1994 with any awareness of "the internet" at all, you likely knew it as something your school's computer lab might have access to, useful for certain kinds of research, not otherwise relevant to daily life.

Then Netscape Navigator 1.0 shipped in December 1994, weeks after most of that year's graduating class had left campus. It was the first browser that made the web look like a designed medium rather than a document archive. Images loaded inline with text. Links were clickable without memorizing commands. You could read a page that looked, however roughly, like a page.

The growth from that point was exponential in a way the word "exponential" doesn't adequately convey. There were roughly 10,000 websites when Navigator launched. Within a year there were 100,000. Within two years, a million. The domain registration system that had been a quiet technical bureaucracy became a land rush. Amazon launched in 1995. eBay launched in 1995. Yahoo launched in 1995. Hot mail launched in 1996.

The observation that the web was "for nerds" was statistically accurate in 1994 and statistically obsolete within eighteen months. The browser made the difference, it removed the technical barriers that had made internet access a specialist skill and replaced them with an interface that worked like flipping through channels. The class of 1994 graduated just before that transition. The class of 1996 entered a different world. The window between them was not a generation; it was a single product release.