I was in college in the mid-90s. I don't know anyone who saw it as a toy. We'd already been using Pine and BBS for many years prior and this seemed like the next iteration of that. The first time I saw the WWW was when I was in a computer lab and someone was on ESPN (or some other sport's website) on the computer next to me. I leaned over and asked them what they were looking at. They showed me what a browser is and how you go to web pages. I tried it out and was hooked. I immediately started to try to make my own webpages. Of course, back then webpages were ugly, but they were infinitely easier to build than these days. No CSS, no JavaScript, just plain HTML and nothing else. Anyway, getting off topic. The WWW was not seen as a toy by anyone that I knew of.