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Remembering Dotcom, Pondering LLMs

Comparing hypes and bubbles

May 2026

There's a lot of talk about an AI (or, rather, LLM) bubble these days, and comparisons to the dotcom boom 30-odd years ago are tempting. The general idea behind comparing AI and dotcom often seems to in defense of a likely AI bubble, making the argument that even if the dotcom bubble burst, the tech certainly prevailed and is today firmly embedded in almost every part of the global economy.

In one sense, it's a way of defending the current financial irrationality as a necessary means to an end, but depending on how it's structured, the argument often misses the target. One such poorly structured comparison I stumbled across recently was made in a presentation by business analyst Ben Evans (slide deck here):

Imagine asking "What will be changed by the internet?" in 1997.

Similar rhetoric pops up regularly when discussing AI hype. To people who vaguely remember the IT boom and bust at the turn of the millennium, but have no deeper interest in tech business, it might sound like a plausible conundrum. When coming from a professional business analyst, it sounds if not dishonest, then at least ill-informed: It's true that nobody in 1997 could give detailed predictions about the rise and fall of Myspace, but it's false that there wasn't enough information available for analysts to get a fairly clear picture of the way things were heading.

Things of the Future

Above is a scan of the (long since defunct) bi-weekly Swedish computer periodical Datormagazin, issue 20, 1994, page 9. Datormagazin's target audience was ordinary home computer geeks, and on a two-page spread, the magazine reported from the "IT Festival", a show held at various venues around Stockholm, including the National Museum of Science and Technology. It was open to the public and attracted 8,000 visitors.

Clockwise from the top left, the captions read:

A teenage boy's room of the future will house a computer terminal, a video phone and an interactive TV [the article text describes it as a functional equivalent of a streaming service].

Volvo displayed their latest technology for trip planning. By entering a destination, the driver can access the best route and avoid traffic jams.

The display that attracted most visitors of all ages were SISU's [the Swedish Institute for Systems Development] liveboard screens. Adult or child, anyone could draw and write together with visitors at Electrum in Kista [another show venue].

A number of video phones were installed at the museum and Cyber Sphere at the Stockholm House of Culture [another show venue]. Visitors were often more interested in seeing who they were talking to than they were in the actual conversation.

The usefulness and convenience of Volvo's GPS/satnav, augmented with live traffic information, was hard to argue with. However, the visitors might not have been as excited about the collaborative video conferencing displays, had they realized that 30 years later, they'd be sitting in endless Teams meetings, arguing about whose turn it was to hijack the shared Powerpoint presentation.

It's apparent that few people in 1994 envisioned that a teenage boy in 2026 would have his computer, video phone and interactive TV (streaming service) all in one relatively affordable handheld device. The concepts were clear, though, and the technology on display already existed and worked.

Loftier Visions

Incidentally, 1994 was also the year when Sun Microsystems released a commercial about an imaginary computer called Starfire. The Starfire has a capacitive touchscreen and an accompanying tablet computer with motion sensors and a built-in camera. Among its many software features we find video conferencing, collaborative document editing, digital document signing, AI-assisted photo and video editing, and instant scanning. The framework story of the commercial features a middle manager preparing a corporate presentation about an electric car.

In AT&T's vision of the future (predating Sun's by a year), we can see a lot of similar concepts taken even further, including VR headsets, tablet computers, video conferencing, online shopping and - interestingly - instant speech translation and AI agents. The last two certainly didn't feel as if they were just around the corner back then.

Look at him. Look at his pinstripe sprezzatura, his devil-may-care pipe smoking, his subtly greying beard. Most of all, look at his 1982 Panasonic RL-H1400 handheld computer with a modem attachment. Wisdom, business savvy, style: Women want him, men want to be him. What if this could all be one small device, maybe with a slightly better screen? What then, dude? What then?

Inside the Boom

I was there, Gandalf. I was there 3000 years ago (well, 30-ish at least), during the dotcom boom, as a pimply-faced junior developer, watching it all...