Back then the future was difficult to discern. I entered grad school in 1974 and at that time having a 300 baud modem (30 characters/second) at home was a luxury that only one of my friends could afford. I didn't have a personal computer.
I was creative back then, and I remember envisioning VR very similar to today's VR. After studying visual displays and how they were projected on screens for pilots in flight simulators I presented an idea to my computer graphics class that we could put small displays on a helmet one for each eye and have motion and orientation sensors on the helmet to simulate what a pilot would see in 3D as he looked around the virtual cockpit. I said we could even develop multiuser experiences in a big gymnasium with a virtual landscape displayed in each participant's helmet displays. My professor dismissed the ideas as fanciful, and I moved on to other ideas.
It was easy to imagine a future where lots of people owned personal computers and had modems that could be used to log into servers over dial-up lines; I remembered thinking that player verses player games would become a thing because the number of pairs of users online would grow much faster than the number of users [N(N-1) vs N]. But here, I was imagining a single multiuser server, not an internet.
I was aware of the ARPA NET and had even tried out the PLATO timesharing system. I had a copy of Ted Nelson's interesting book of rambling ideas titled Dream Machines where he talked about hypertext, Xanadu, etc. I was also a teaching assistant for a telecommunications course where we talked about the possibility of fiber to the home replacing analog phone lines and providing bandwidth that could replace video rentals for entertainment.
All of these hints foreshadowed the development of the internet, but I didn't see it and neither did any of my colleagues. The scale and importance of the internet just eluded me.
As late as 1989 when I started a software company, it wasn't clear that the company should have it's own domain name!