I'm not sure if I can express how different the dot com boom era was to someone who didn't live through it. America Online kindasorta brought the Web to everyday people's homes around about the beginning of 1995, except that at that time everyday people didn't necessarily even have computers at home. Four years later we were almost living in a different world. Darn near every college student had a computer connected to the Internet in their dorm room. Every office worker had a computer on their desk and conducted at least some of their work in a Web browser. My grandmother was trying to chat me up on instant messages so many times per day that it was starting to get annoying.
It really was quite remarkable. Compared to it, the AI "boom" has been more like a wet diaper fart.