There were online services before "the internet" meaning the WWW, was a thing, where you could do many of the things that were later reinvented in the late 90s.

There were online services before "the internet" meaning the WWW, was a thing, where you could do many of the things that were later reinvented in the late 90s. I just looked up one, Prodigy, and it appears that it started around 1980 at which point online shopping was one of the motivators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prodigy_(online_service) I'm not saying that I, or most people, were shopping online by 1992, but I think that's way too late to call the idea "forward thinking". Whoever was considering the idea in the 60s or 70s was "forward thinking".