To give Thuerk his due, he did see, just as clearly as Benjamin Day or other pioneering attention merchants had, that there was value to all those eyeballs focused on the same thing. No one remarked it at the time, but the mind tended to fix on this new screen even more attentively than to television. Such a mind was therefore in the state most naturally primed for being sold something. But it would be another generation before the commercial potential of the computer would be manifest.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 665