I realize that these are commonly-held tropes, but where is the actual article that says this? There's the famous "the internet isn't a big deal" thing in Newsweek (and funnily enough that piece is extremely prescient in many other ways!), but I don't know if I've seen the kind of hype-busting then.

But also...the reason they might have is that email kind of sucked back then. Of course you wouldn't see the promise in something that was clunky and slow and nobody used.

This isn't a comparable to LLMs, though, because even someone who found them clunky could see why you'd want to send an email versus sending a letter.