Rewind seventeen years – Ace of Base was on the radio, Shindler’s List won 7 Oscars and Nelson Mandela became President of South Africa. And nobody knew what the Internet was.

On US television, The Today Show hosts Katie Couric and Bryant Gumbel certainly didn’t. In this video clip from January 24th 1994, they make an absolute mess of the jargon that has come to define the intervening years.

There’s confusion about how you pronounce “@” – Katie Couric who has never been the brightest spark in the fire suggests “about”. They all try to avoid saying “dot” when they read “.com”.

A crew member is asked about how the internet works. Do you write to it like mail? Is it just in Universities? Does it require a phone line? …This was less than two decades ago, and it’s a wonderful reminder of how unprepared the mainstream media was for the innovation that was about to sweep the globe. And, of course, for how it would expose that very same mainstream media as biased, out of touch and lazy.

It’s also frightening to remember that after this video it’d be another 10 years before Google would IPO and Facebook, Twitter and so on were not even ideas. It even predates Netscape (remember them?) and Yahoo. Now there are hatfuls of billionaires on the back of it all.

Time flies, eh? At least you can still buy 5.25″ floppy disks. TheEye still has some around with data on…