Up until the web existed, I think it was extremely hard to usefully predict the Internet's impact. TCP was invented in 1974, but it wasn't until 1993 that we started seeing things that really pointed to where we were going: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_founded_befor...
Of course, everybody knew computers would be important. But that was true starting in the 1960s. E.g., Stand on Zanzibar has a supercomputer as a central plot element.
I mean, if you even look at popular sci-fi, nobody exactly predicted the internet as it is today. It wasn't until someone coined the "information superhighway" that gears started turning. Even then, the earliest commercial websites were basically just digital brochures and catalogs. It wasn't until SaaS, search and social took off that we grasped what the specific use cases were that were going to be the dominant money makers. And the internet evolved quite a bit as a result.
Some people like me still lament the loss of the 90s internet in some ways, as it felt like a more "wild west" domain and not saturated and stale like it is today.
It looks like those terms from the 60s and 70s referred to "superhighway" in regards to communication, but didn't prefix it with "information". And whether someone incidentally used the word or not is sort of irrelevant. It started to become popular as a means of visualizing the possibilities of the internet in the late 80s and 90s, and that's when I think the first people started to imagine what this might become in the abstract.
I'm leaning the other way -- that the usages were significant.
The Brotherton reference in particular interests me -- masers and light-masers (as lasers were initially called) were pretty brand-spanking new, and were themselves the original "solution in search of a problem". I've since come to realise that any time you can create either a channel or medium with a very high level of uniformity and the capacity to be modulated in some way, as well as to be either transmitted/received (channel) or written/read (medium), you've got the fundamental prerequisites for an informational system based on either signal transmission (for channels) or storage (for media).
Which Brotherton beat me to the punch by at least 55 years, if I'm doing my maths correctly.
I've made a quick search for the book -- it's not on LibGen (though Internet Archive has a copy for lending, unfortunately the reading experience there is ... poor), and no library within reasonable bounds seems to have a copy. Looks like it might be interesting reading however.
Point being: Brotherton (or a source of his) had the awareness to make that connection, and to see the potential as comparable to the other contemporary revolution in network technology, the ground-transit superhighway. That strikes me as a significant insight.
Whether or not he was aware of simultaneous developments in other areas such as packet switching (also 1964, see: https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.html) would be very interesting to know.
Not much information on him, but Manfred Brotherton retired from Bell Labs in 1964, and died in 1981:
That's a cool article on Baran, it looks like he predicted Amazon in 1968, and they were experimenting with early email type systems in that time, too. I'm sure the bulletin board followed shortly after.
Baran's full set of monographs written for RAND are now freely available online. I'd asked a couple of years ago if they might include one specifically, and they published the whole lot. Asking nicely works, sometimes.
