How the Internet Didn't Fail As Predicted 259
Lord Byron Eee PC writes "Newsweek is carrying a navel-gazing piece on how wrong they were when in 1995 they published a story about how the Internet would fail. The original article states, 'Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.' The article continues to say that online shopping will never happen, that airline tickets won't be purchased over the web, and that newspapers have nothing to fear. It's an interesting look back at a time when the Internet was still a novelty and not yet a necessity."
Wish he was wrong about the salespeople (Score:5, Interesting)
From TF95A:
Oh, how I wish the network were still missing that "essential ingredient". On the page containing the 1995 lament, I now see ads for:
* Hugh Downs' Artery Cleaning "Secret" (now with 50% more Nobel Prize Laureate!)
* Acai Berry Exposed - Official Test
* Drivers from Minnesota wanted! (of course, I'm in Dallas... with a MN proxy server)
* Saint Paul - Mom Lost 46lbs Following 1 Rule (MN mislocalization again)
* DON'T Pay for White Teeth (with the requisite sugar cube clenched in teeth, WTF?)
Meanwhile, *my* neighborhood mall -- the first air-conditioned mall west of the Mississippi -- is now a grass-covered field [wikipedia.org].
That said, I don't think I could go back to 1995, though it would be a fun challenge. The best part was doing DNS reverse lookups of domain names, since the company's network didn't have a DNS server. I could read David Letterman's Top Ten list the next morning, if I plugged the right octets into something called "Netscape" -- I thought I was livin' large.
Negroponte (Score:2, Interesting)
Government crackdowns (Score:4, Interesting)
Did they predict that governments will attempt to crack down on free speech on the internet by dreaming up fake terror threats and copyright nonsense to control the internet, and thus please the governments corporate whore masters?
Internet search has come a long way. (Score:5, Interesting)
Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question,
Heh. Lets cut and past "date of the Battle of Trafalgar" into the location bar of Chrome here...
and instantly...
"Battle of Trafalgar — Date: 21 October 1805
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Trafalgar [wikipedia.org]"
Proving that internet search made the internet useful. The article's author had a stunning failure of vision.
Not surprising (Score:2, Interesting)
Back in 1995, I was just finishing up a Journalism degree at a Big Ten university, and in more than one media class, the subject of the internet (and its future) came up. But it was the students that brought it up...not the professors or the teaching assistants.
Unfortunately, the subject was always dismissed as some kind of fad. In fact, in one class, the assistant refused to even discuss the subject at all, almost as if he was annoyed by it. So, I'm not surprised at all that some in the mainstream media have been slow to really comprehend the subject, let alone adapt their business models.
Re:What makes it really ironic (Score:3, Interesting)
A few months after this article being published i was in my first job... creating an online store selling stuff over the internet. I believe Amazon was just getting started then too. They have done quite well for themselves...
Things did change very quickly though, Netscape 2.0 was the game changer as you say.
Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too (Score:1, Interesting)
People who think they are very self-important tend to underestimate the impact of things they did not directly influence. Perhaps he was not involved with the PC and thus thought it was destined to failure.
Well even if it wasn't a misquote [wikipedia.org], that quotation supposedly originated in 1943. I don't think anyone [wikipedia.org] was working on personnel computers back then, so we should excuse Mr. Thomas J. Watson from considering market that wouldn't exist until after he died! So your sentiment, while laudable, is rather misdirected in this instance.:P
Re:Interesting (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple is the Mercedes Benz or BMW of the computer industry. They deliver the best-designed products with "why didn't I think of that?!" features that eventually become commonplace on the Fords and Chevrolets of the computer industry. How many computer makers let you into the case without turning screws? ....
Apparently Apple disagreed with jcoleman (139158) regarding "easily openable case == design feature"
Or, "openable case == design feature"
Source [slashdot.org]
In all fairness, his remaining 6 points are fairly valid and some are responsible for Apple's success in the market today.
Stoll? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
There is a difference, when that paper was released everybody could see past their BS and realize they were wishful-thinking.
The iPod *was* lame, as in, lacking features the competition has had since the beginning, the iPod "won" by means of a) Marketing and b) The iTMS.
By "won" I mean, being the biggest player, it is no the sole player by a long shot.
I don't have numbers to back this up, over half the media player owners I know own something else than an iPod, but I live in Mexico, does anyone can bring statistics about media players in the world or at least the US?
Re:What makes it really ironic (Score:3, Interesting)
No, what makes it really ironic, is that one year later (1996), ICQ was released. The first social network. (Yes, it had all the functions to count as a real social network. I know because I had my first blind date because of it. [Turned out not so well though. ;])
Re:Internet search has come a long way. (Score:3, Interesting)
Sometimes I miss the old days of internet search. Sure, you had to hunt through half a dozen pages of results to find the information you were looking for. But half the fun is in the search. The other half is ending up in places you never would have thought to go on your own. These days you can find what you're looking for in a few clicks. Somehow that makes the internet feel smaller.
Stoll versus Lanier (Score:3, Interesting)
It's instructive to look at the differences in what Clifford Stoll says versus what someone like Jaron Lanier says.
Clifford Stoll reminds us that technology is not a panacea, and to stay human.
Jaron Lanier is upset by "numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals" - you know, that the peasants were let onto the ARPAnet. His main gripe with the Internet is that he doesn't get the attention any more [newstechnica.com].
Re:I've never understoof Stoll's about face (Score:3, Interesting)
Because at the time, the "bleeding edge" was not "the web", it was the Internet.
It's hard to remember back when "the web" didn't exist, but today "the web" is all that people think of. Today, when you say "internet", people expect your next words to be "double-u double-u double-u". Try saying "FTP" or "UUCP" and watch their eyes glaze over.
At the time Stoll was "bleeding edge", we hadn't run across the eternal September of AOL. AOL was, at best, their own message boards, much like Compuserve. We're talking about a time before dejaNews, when BITNET ran FTP-by-mail servers, when you needed a valid reason to have an Internet connection to start with. You didn't call your local ISP or cable company to get on the Internet, you called PSI or Network Solutions or someone else and rented a T1 ... and if you hacked your way onto the net it was through someone's 300 baud HayesStack connected to a serial port somewhere.
Except for having his computer using a Federal Screw Works Votrax unit reading the data as it passed by, the kid in War Games was doing exactly what most of us were doing for fun in those days of "the Internet". (I didn't own my own Votrax until I bought it at a PBS auction for $30 -- nobody else apparently knew what it was or what it was worth at the time.)
And "bleeding edge computer science" at the time was hooking a Votrax up to a phone line and modem and having it call the local pizza place to order pizza. It was billed as the perfect helpmate to the mute person.
Re:The interwebs! (Score:3, Interesting)
That is actually arguable. With more companies using the Internet to coordinate tasks such as purchasing and shipping, and more dependence on VoIP for telephone service, you could have people dying.
That sounds silly, but consider a few things. Most essential products (food, clothing, shelter) are not sourced locally. While clothing and shelter do not need to be replenished daily, food is essential.
Most areas do not have sufficient production nor storage of food supplies for any sort of long term survival. Therefore, food must be brought in from those areas that are production areas. Huh? How many cows have you seen grazing in Manhattan? To the best of my knowledge, with the exception of maybe the Central Park Zoo, there are none. How many places can you buy milk, a hamburger, or steak? Ooohh, a whole lot. If the food supply were to be cut off to Manhattan, how long would the food supplies last? My best guess would be a week or two. Looters and hoarders will swing that to be a very wide range.
Quite a bit of the coordination of moving these food supplies are done over the Internet. But, moving the supplies is just one thing. Transportation requires fuel, vehicles, and workers.
Sure, it could maintain in a world without the Internet, but since quite a few facilities have migrated over to Internet based technologies for management, reinventing them without access to the previous resources may be virtually impossible.
I like to ask the same question about Los Angeles. Say there was a large earthquake, where the seaports and airports were rendered unusable, and major highways (I-5, I-10, I-15, CA-14, CA-1) were rendered useless (landslides, collapsed bridges, etc). How long could the Los Angeles area survive on it's own? It's a fair comparison. Isolation of the Internet, where the Internet is an essential part of the coordination of transportation for essential goods, is just as dangerous as if the physical routes to bring supplies in were rendered unusable. My guess (with a lot of math behind it) was honestly 1-2 weeks before dehydration and starvation became a serious problem. The Los Angeles area can't survive without pumping fresh water to the homes and businesses. In 4 to 8 weeks, there would be a very minimal population left.
Some people who lived there said, "we'd make it", until I spelled it out. They shifted to "We'll drive to ..." and they all had different directions. I broke the bad news to them. Millions of people will have the same idea, and most passenger vehicles are only designed for a 300 to 400 maximum range before refueling. They didn't get the reports that bridges or sections of roads were blocked. Putting millions of people on the road all trying to leave would unfortunately leave you parked, burning off what fuel you may have had before whatever incident happened. That of course was countered with "We'll walk." Good luck there. It's somewhere over 350 miles to get to the San Francisco area. 125 miles to the San Diego area. It could be pretty much assumed that they'd both be in the same predicament at that point. Las Vegas is only 256 miles, or Phoenix is 375 miles. There's a lot of dry areas, so unless you happen to have a mule to carry water for you, I wouldn't hold out hope to surviving the hike. Considering rest breaks, people generally walk about 2 miles per hour, and may be able to sustain that for 8 hours. Say you're feeling really ambitious, and walk without stopping for 16 hours per day, you may make it 100 miles in 3.5 days. Oh ya, you had to carry supplies to do that too. Lets ask the military how far they could expect in shape folks carrying supplies to walk every day...
"An infantry div on the march averages 12-15 miles per day, an armored div 100 miles per day."
- U.S. De
Re:The interwebs! (Score:3, Interesting)
I like to ask the same question about Los Angeles. Say there was a large earthquake, where the seaports and airports were rendered unusable, and major highways (I-5, I-10, I-15, CA-14, CA-1) were rendered useless (landslides, collapsed bridges, etc). How long could the Los Angeles area survive on it's own? It's a fair comparison. Isolation of the Internet, where the Internet is an essential part of the coordination of transportation for essential goods, is just as dangerous as if the physical routes to bring supplies in were rendered unusable. My guess (with a lot of math behind it) was honestly 1-2 weeks before dehydration and starvation became a serious problem. The Los Angeles area can't survive without pumping fresh water to the homes and businesses. In 4 to 8 weeks, there would be a very minimal population left.
Keep in mind that the first settlement to Los Angeles had the entire settlement wiped out.... due to starvation and a lack of water. I'm not talking a few people dying of disease, but that the place is simply inhospitable for even a small group of people to live there.... at least live there without massive public works and technology that brings in supplies and materials for you to live there. Los Angeles in particular is a prime example of what technology can do to help bring in resources that turns an inhospitable area into not only a place to live but to thrive and for population to explode.
The one semi-good thing is that Los Angeles can survive on 19th Century technologies (canals, aquaducts, railroads, etc.) if it absolutely needed to happen. I couldn't say the same thing about a similar sized city on the Moon or Mars, but Los Angeles is certainly "proof" that you can sustain a large population in a difficult to live-in climate. It also does help that the general climate there is relatively mild and that people enjoy living there simply because of its location, forgetting that LA is mostly a desert between some mountains. If you need any substantial "proof", try to find the Los Angeles River. It has been made fun of in countless movies, and is about as artificial as the rest of the city too. In the mid-west, it would be a brook that might not even have a name.