Log onto the World Wide Web, type in the address www.superbowl.com, and you enter a football fantasyland featuring equal amounts of statistics, hype, commercialism and cutting edge Internet technology.
By combining their considerable resources, the National Football League, NBC and software powerhouse Microsoft have created a Web site that in its unabashed worship of excess rivals the Super Bowl itself.
There's a complete history of the 30- year-old event, memorable plays of the past, and everything you could possibly want to know about the Cowboys and the Steelers.
It's enough to turn a diehard football fan into a mouse potato, planted in front of a PC, beer in lap.
—David Einstein, "Super Bowl's tangled Web," The San Francisco Chronicle, January 24, 1996
This word appeared originally in Gareth Branwyn's Jargon Watch column, in the January 1994 issue of
Wired magazine. (Original definition: "The online and interactive-TV generation's answer to the couch potato.") In an e-mail to the American Dialect Society, Gareth notes that the writer Alice Kahn appears to have coined
mouse potato in 1993 (a refererence to her as coiner appears in a message to The Well BBS on September 11, 1993).
