We had these companies by '99, so assume the starting point for the ten year timeline is 1989. The 'internet' had already been opened up to certain universities

We had these companies by '99, so assume the starting point for the ten year timeline is 1989. The 'internet' had already been opened up to certain universities/institutions in 1981 (and was in government R&D years before that). There were plenty of people in 1991 who said the internet wasn't going to be or do much of anything. The most charitable reading of the crypto tech timeline is to say that the bubble popped at the protocol layer instead of the application layer. In that case, we're somewhere around 1989-1993/94. Maybe we're still waiting for a Tim Berners-Lee. Who knows.