Back in the days of Internet Bubble 1.0 (right around the turn of the popular millennium), I used to pause every once in a while to look around at the swirling maelstrom of Internet-enabled technologies that we (and that’s a very collective “we”) were unleashing on the world.

Sure, maybe a lot of it didn’t make any business sense (we all found that out a few years later), and I didn’t even pretend to understand the actual technology that powered it, but I was pretty confident that I “got” what it was all about. Though even now, I’m not exactly sure what that was (or is), though we had plenty of buzzwords that we used to try to lay out the boundaries of the space: many-to-many, disintermediation, on-demand, always on.

There were plenty of people who didn’t get the Internet, though; they were marked (often proudly, perversely) by the flashing “12:00″ on their VCRs, and we often called them “Mom & Dad” — it conveniently marked the generational divide between folks who may have, perhaps, used computers as adults, versus people who grew up with them during the boom