I didn't see any mention of onion routing. There's several references to the "Deep Web", but that's in the context of file-sharing peer-to-peer networks.
My impression of the -sparse- darknet mentions is that they were independently (= not through their P2P monitoring software) looking for useful data there and manually inserting it into their datastore.
> In the nineties, Microsoft pursued a canonical FUD strategy, creating phony error messages to make consumers wary of using Windows on a competitor’s operating system—a tactic that resulted in a legal settlement exceeding two hundred million dollars.
Huh. I was thinking it was something to do with MS Word or other MS apps (which I know often had cross-OS or alternate OS versions, like Mac support). But no, that is indeed about... running Windows on a non-MS OS (non-MS DOS). Back when Windows was a GUI shell around DOS. Now that is history.