[dboreham]

I was around at the time and this is partly correct but somewhat wrong. We were trying to connect people so they could share information and collaborate, but those people at the time were in (different) offices. The notion of people working from their home didn't really arise for regular people (ironically the CEO class always did) until powerful laptops and DSL or HFC residential service appeared. Sometime around 2000.

I first worked from home for one project in 1992 but I had to lug a computer from the office -- several trips to the car to get it all loaded. And I had no network connectivity. A few years later in 2000 I began full time remote work but I still needed a rack of servers in my basement and eventually constructed my own ISP to get decent connectivity. Totally remote working where it's just me and a laptop and a fast network probably took another 10 years to arrive.

So if you got in your time machine and talked to Vint Cerf in 1990, sure he'd be interested in the vision that nobody would need a physical office at some time in the future, but that wasn't why he was building the network because nobody could practically do so for at least a decade and nobody at the time could predict how long it would take. Some predicted advances such as telemedicine and remote learning only took off due to a pandemic, for societal and regulatory reasons, not technical ones.