Yeah, that was about when I heard it as well, but it is so long ago I can't say for sure.

Back in the 80s and early 90s Microsoft was consolidating its monopoly. They were promising all kinds of shit that didn't exist. That was still a DOS world at the PC level and we could see much more clearly what was going on. Specifically in that much less complex environment we could see that what Microsoft said their software could do in newspapers ("What's a newspaper, grandpa?") we could prove in 2 minutes didn't exist. Thus Vaporware instead of Software.

I believe the "u" in "Vaporware" disappeared with the Y2K scam. ;-)