[nostrademons]

1998 is the later days of AOL. Its heyday was 1991-1995, when basically everybody got multiple AOL disks in the mail, you'd have TV advertisements telling you to visit a certain AOL keyword, and they were basically the only user-friendly way of getting online. (The competition like Prodigy or Compuserve had very clunky user interfaces, and GEnie and BBSes were text-only.)

The writing was on the wall for AOL as soon as Netscape and Yahoo came out in 1994.

[trainsplanes]

Feels strange to say 1991 was the heyday. I don't know of a single person with a home PC in 1991, much less internet.

Mid-90s to very early 2000s was nonstop AOL commercials and CDs in the mail. Chat rooms were booming and you couldn't watch a single TV show without a "You've got mail!" reference.

[nostrademons]

"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." -- William Gibson.

I was the last of my friends in elementary school to get a computer - my first was a Mac LC in 1991. Where I was, they were rare in 1986 but ubiquitous by about 1989. Would go over to friends' houses to play Carmen Sandiego, Oregon Trail, or Number Munchers. I was on the WWW by 1994. Grew up in suburban Boston, so the area was relatively affluent and educated.

I suspect this is like how my 3-year-old (growing up in Silicon Valley) thinks that robots, self-driving cars, and drones are just an ordinary part of reality, while they remain science-fiction for many Americans.

[kevinventullo]

To bolster your point, the movie “You’ve Got Mail” released in December 1998.