[bparsons]

In 1996, the technology was good enough that you could see the future very clearly, but it still was very clunky from a consumer and enterprise point of view.

Credit card transactions were extremely difficult to execute and wildly insecure. If there was one tiny formatting error in your address, you would have to refill the entire form again (before the days of autocomplete).

Websites might takes three or four minutes to load. Often they wouldn't load at all, or components would be missing.

Often your home internet connection would just stop working for minutes or hours at a time for no reason.

However, you could see that things were moving in a certain direction, and stuff like Amazon made complete sense already (even if it didn't work that well for 95% of people).