Not academia, GC (and lots of other PLT) was mature and productized then, just missed by the majority of the industry living the dark ages. In the 90s, enterprisey architecture astronaut cultures went Java/C++ and hackerish cultures went Perl/Python seasoned with C.
Sure, it's a gross generalization, games and embedded have an excuse. Though I don't think C++ was that big in the mid-90s on games side yet, it was more C.
