Don't know why you pick out 1997, but your're incorrect, as a Uni student that year i looked up buying the sorts of domain you suggest, they were long gone.
I think it was just an example he gave but I guess I got the idea.
I'm tending to agree with Johnny at the beginning of internet it was very hard to imagine that it was not a geeky way to share some boring technical documents but in the future everything is going to be on internet.
I think now it's a bit early to really understand what the bitcoin will do in the future as it was hard for the people too understand at the time of the 10'000
BTC pizza that people will be likely to give btc any value
I beleive the bitcoin will really change the way people share values and services. I can only foreshadow it when I played online games with bitcoin, it's so quick and fast to pay and play, it destroys all the friction on credit card payment and boring account creation and the trust you have to give on the website. It accelerate and facilitate the way people deliver online services.
For example now I cannot imagine paying to read an article of my favorite newspaper online but if the article had a little barcode where you can pay 0.001 BTC for a qualitative article it could really change the online business