I had in mind the sort of networking/software people that I imagine read hackernews these days, not the overall people in the world, nor the overall population of MBAs/business people. There was a lot of idealism, among the people writing drivers and servers, and plugging in wires to enable the connections, that connecting the world would be good, increase understanding and solve problems faster and so on.
I will point out that in the US, the overall picture was we'd beaten the Soviet dictatorship, and democracy seemed to be spreading, and the income inequality was better than it is now and houses were affordable to a lot more young people. Also we had a budget surplus one year. Gay people couldn't get married and could be kicked out of homes and jobs, and there was a lot of anti-Black police brutality and war on drugs, but it seemed possibly less than in the 1950s and we hoped it would continue to decline. (Possibly distributed and networked cameras via cell phones have put pressure against police brutality, I think the outcome there is not certain either way, but the people of good conscience now have much more awareness of the violence inherent in the system.)
I certainly felt optimistic. Of course, I was also a young adult, found my calling in writing network services, had my first child, bought a house, all that good stuff. Unlike many software engineers today, I had sort of stumbled into the distributed networked computing world, having worked at other much less fun jobs, and I appreciated, not getting paid to be a lord of the society, but getting paid at all for such interesting and fulfilling work. Every raise I got was an astonishment and a delight. Once I passed $60,000 per anum, I was able to get a house. It was quite cool, given all the mocking that math/programming people had been subjected to the prior several decades.
I will point out that in the US, the overall picture was we'd beaten the Soviet dictatorship, and democracy seemed to be spreading, and the income inequality was better than it is now and houses were affordable to a lot more young people. Also we had a budget surplus one year. Gay people couldn't get married and could be kicked out of homes and jobs, and there was a lot of anti-Black police brutality and war on drugs, but it seemed possibly less than in the 1950s and we hoped it would continue to decline. (Possibly distributed and networked cameras via cell phones have put pressure against police brutality, I think the outcome there is not certain either way, but the people of good conscience now have much more awareness of the violence inherent in the system.)
I certainly felt optimistic. Of course, I was also a young adult, found my calling in writing network services, had my first child, bought a house, all that good stuff. Unlike many software engineers today, I had sort of stumbled into the distributed networked computing world, having worked at other much less fun jobs, and I appreciated, not getting paid to be a lord of the society, but getting paid at all for such interesting and fulfilling work. Every raise I got was an astonishment and a delight. Once I passed $60,000 per anum, I was able to get a house. It was quite cool, given all the mocking that math/programming people had been subjected to the prior several decades.