Among the wares talked up online were upbeat prognostications about the Net itself. For $3,500 you could buy a report from a California consulting firm that said annual commerce on the Net and commercials services such as CompuServe would reach $600 billion by the turn of the century. I was skeptical. Merchants like JoAnn Lilienfeld would have to sell warehouse after warehouse of stuffed animals or toys or whatever the offerings were. In fact, $600 billion was a good 8 percent of international commerce. On reflection, however, the estimate from Killen & Associates seemed possible. Through the Net you might find a buyer for shipload of scrap iron or an office building, not just a stray teddy bear in need of a child. I phoned Mary Cronin of Boston College, who had written a well-regarded book called _Doing Business on the Internet_. It teemed with examples from Digital Equipment Corporation and IBM and many other computer-oriented firms. And she had researched it before most business people grasped the importance of the Internet. Yes, she said, the $600 billion figure sounded credible if you counted business-to-business transactions. Daniel Dern, an Internet consultant, had his own opinion on the statistics. He said the Net was like the highway. Just what did you count—all the goods that went over the road? The combined salaries of the people on the way to work? I could see his point. Whatever the exact numbers, the demographics and technology might be on the side of the many retail businesses if they stuck it out on the Net and kept expectations realistic. Scads of people in Generation Net were about to marry. They would buy houses and cars and whatever else mattered beyond stereos and Internet-optimized computers. Just in the late summer and fall of 1994, the number of Net-related businesses on the Web had doubled, and a good many of the newcomers were not technical. Could the Net really, then, enrich business people without technical backgrounds? Was there indeed money in what had once been the province of cash-strapped college students and dreamy researchers? Plenty of people thought that the answer lay in the case history of Grant’s Flowers, which, like White Rabbit Toys, operated out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Larry Grant had been a cover boy in an enticing article on the front page of the business section of the _New York Times_; the Internet pulsed with chatter about the electronic coups that he supposedly had achieved for just $28 a month. Excited Netfolks reported that he did not even have to type to his customers on the Internet; new orders just poured in on a fax machine with a Net connection. The California gold rush was almost a century and a half old. And yet, watching the Grant legend take off, I might as well have been among the boots and beards at Sutter’s Mill.