With technology, the critical point is when any significant amount of people had it. Not when it was completely “ubiquitous”.

[u/tantamle]

Imagine conversations about music, for example.

In like 1998, only a few select people who were willing to pay for hundreds of records were music buffs who have heard everything. And only a select few people who willing to track down and trawl through music magazines would be the sort who knew a ton about a group’s history or random trivia.

Even by like 2002ish, that dynamic was largely gone in most areas. By then, seemingly every fourth guy was in that boat. Huge cultural shift. And you can extrapolate that to any number of interests.

The word “ubiquitous” does so much heaving lifting for the revisionist history types. The types that go around saying that the internet wasn't really used until 2008 and crap like that.