By the 90s they were still mainly used as fancy typewriters by “normal” people (my parents, school, etc) although the ridiculous potential was clear from day one.
It just took a looong time to go from pong to ping and then to living online. I’m still convinced even this stage is temporary and only a milestone on the way to bigger and better things. Computing and computational thought still has to percolate into all corners of society.
Again not saying “LLM’s” are the same, but AI in general will probably walk a similar path. It just takes a long time, think decades, not years.
Edit: wanted to mention The Mother of All Demos by Engelbart (1968), which to me looks like it captures all essential aspects of what distributed online computing can do. In a “low resolution”, of course.
They became viable in the 2000's, let's say 2007 with the iPhone, and by late 2010's everyone was living online, so "decades" is a stretch.
1978: the apple ][. 1mhz 8 bit microprocessor, 4kb of ram, monochrome all-,caps display.
1990:Mac IIci, 25mhz 32-bit CPU, 4MB ram, 640x480 color graphics and an easy to use GUI.
Ask any of us who used both of these at the time: it was really amazing.
By 1990 home computer use was still a niche interest. They were still toys, mainly. DTP, word processing and spreadsheets were a thing, but most people had little use for them - I had access to a Mac IIci with an ImageWriter dot matrix around that time and I remember nervously asking a teacher whether I would be allowed to submit a printed typed essay for a homework project - the idea that you could do all schoolwork on a computer was crazy talk. By then, tools like Mathematica existed but as a curiosity not an essential tool like modern maths workbooks are.
The internet is what changed everything.
Regular people shrug and say, yeah sure, but what can I do with it. They still do this day.
One day at work about 10-15 years ago I looked at my daily schedule and found that on that day my team were responsible for delivering a 128kb build of Tetris and a 4GB build of Real Racing.
Broadband. Dial-up was still too much of an annoyance, too expensive.
Once broadband was ubiquitous in the US and Europe, that's when the real explosion of computer usage happened.
For some strange reason html forms is an incredibly impotent technology. Pretty standard things are missing like radioboxes with an other text input. 5000+ years ago the form labels aligned perfectly with the value.
I can picture it already, ancient Mesopotamia, the clay tablet needs name and address fields for the user to put their name and address behind. They pull out a stamp or a roller.
Of course if you have a computer you can have stamps with localized name and address formatting complete with validation as a basic building block of the form. Then you have a single clay file with all the information neatly wrapped together. You know, a bit like that e-card no one uses only without half data mysteriously hidden from the record by some ignorant clerk saboteur.
We've also failed to hook up devices to computers. We went from the beautiful serial port to IoT hell with subscriptions for everything. One could go on all day like that, payments, arithmetic, identification, etc much work still remains. I'm unsure what kind of revolution would follow.
Talking thinking machines will no doubt change everything. That people believe it is possible is probably the biggest driver. You get more people involved, more implementations, more experiments, more papers, improved hardware, more investments.
(And, irrelevant, but my parents were in fact both posting to Usenet in 1983.)