It would presumably be the August 1991 coup if it were the Soviet Union, as it was one of the factors leading to the USSR dissolving at the end of the year. The Autumn 1993 coup was in the Russian Federation (and the geriatric plotters in the Kremlin kinda won that one). So 1992?

That's what I thought, too, but the top of the article says "For the Conference on HyperNetworking, Oita, Japan" which was in '94. So, I thought maybe "last summer" was internally even off by a couple years? I'm really not sure, but someone around these parts probably knows. Worth mentioning that also in the early 90s people did refer to the Russian Federation as the Soviet Union sometimes as a shortening of "the former Soviet Union".

The estimate of "The Internet" connecting 800,000 computers is probably also pretty surgically date-identifying (at least to isolate 1992 to 1998 given how fast it was growing at the time, though estimation error might cause a little trouble!). For example, https://web.mit.edu/people/mkgray/net/internet-growth-summar... also suggests 1994 (although that estimate was 0.6 million) while 1992 would be more like 200,000 although as per my scare quotes (and that MIT link) "The Internet" was also a somewhat vague term at the time. And by 1998 it was surely over 10 million which makes the @karel-3d quite likely incorrect, although who knows - maybe that's when the EFF first put it up on their web site?

EDIT: I mostly think it matters since observations that might have seemed quite prescient in 1992 (like also-Mormon Orson Scott Card's even more prescient ideas in 1985 Ender's Game with Locke & Demosthenes political chat personas based on 1980s BBS/UUCP network activity) were very much things everyone was saying by 1998.

[deleted]

That shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, it wouldn't surprise me if people still used the old name even if it isn't technically correct.

I just put the title to Google and pattern-matched 1998. I am sorry, as I was probably wrong, it seems it's earlier.

edit: earliest web archive crawl is from 1996

https://web.archive.org/web/19961220120042/https://www.eff.o...

so you are probably right with 1994