Size of the Internet[1] in 1999: "Estimates the publicly indexable Web at 800 million pages, 6 terabytes of text data on 2.8 million servers as of February 1999."[2]
Snowclone of a credit-card advertising campaign: Worthless.
[1] back when it was still a proper noun.
[2] Steve Lawrence and C. Lee Giles. "Accessibility and Distribution of Information on the Web," Nature 400(6740): 107-109, July 8, 1999
I've been using the internet at work since 1997. But it was not nearly as ubiquitous as it is now. "Surfing the web" was generally something people did at home, on a 56k modem. A software engineer fixing the Y2K bug in bank software probably didn't have much access, and probably didn't care a whole lot anyway. Certainly, the movie made no mention of the internet.
And obviously facebook was merely an example. 1999 was pre-reddit, pre-wikipedia, pre-digg, pre-hacker news, and pre-twitter. Yahoo had just bought viaweb. Most of the people using the web today weren't using it in 1999, and most of the pages, services, and content that exist today did not exist in 1999.
The point is that no matter how distracting the internet might be, procrastination has always been an issue for developers.
