> though I didn't necessarily give much stock to his predictions.

Every year that I worked at 3Com, we proclaimed it was "the Year of the Network!" It became a running industry joke.

But of course, Metcalfe's Law contains some fundamental truths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law

I remember those days, with Computer Currents' "Year of the LAN" parody predictions repeated year after year. Macs with PhoneNET definitely made it easier and cheaper in the beginning.

It's like proclaiming The Year of Electricity. You can proclaim it once, say, in 1900, and it just would never end since then.

Proclaim the Year of the Network some time in 1993 or 1994, and you're golden.