Enjoy playing around online. I certainly do. Just realize the new medium isn’t ready for serious business yet. “We have a system that’s going to double in size this year and is getting ready to do it again,” Postel says. “We know that this can’t go on forever, but currently, we’re in this almost straight-up growth curve. We’re on the edge of having problems there.”
Predictor: Postel, Jon
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Bob Dunn writes about slow service on the Internet, the causes and possible solutions. He quotes Jon Postel. Dunn writes: ”While demand for the Internet and other mass-market online services is soaring, physical infrastructure and administrative resources lag. The resultant Information Superwhatever is usually good enough for curious seekers of casual entertainment or cheap thrills. And often it’s good enough for quality communication and research. But not often enough. So by all means, enjoy playing around online. I certainly do. Just realize the new medium isn’t ready for serious business yet. ‘When you pick up your phone, you expect it to work,’ says Jon Postel, an Internet Society trustee and Internet Architecture Board member. ‘What about e-mail?’ With e-mail, you don’t expect it to work; you just hope it will … Demand for a product is usually a good thing for suppliers, but in the case of the Internet, demand is so steep that some people question whether supply can possibly keep up. ‘We have a system that’s going to double in size this year and is getting ready to do it again,’ Postel says. ‘We know that this can’t go on forever, but currently, we’re in this almost straight-up growth curve. We’re on the edge of having problems there.’ … If local Internet providers already have trouble installing modems fast enough to keep up with the number of customers on their systems, where will they be in a year? If Internet servers already are overflowing with message-routing information, what are they going to do with 66 million new e-mail addresses? We’ll find out.”
Biography:Jon Postel worked with Leonard Kleinrock at UCLA’s Network Measurement Center from its beginning days in the 1960s, and thus was part of the team developing and testing the ARPANET. Regarded as an arbiter of standards for the Internet in its early days, he was involved in a number of Internet-governing activities. In 1988 he became the first director of the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority; he also was U.S. Domain registrar and RFC editor for many years. (Pioneer/Originator.)
Date of prediction: December 4, 1995
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Number of Users
Name of publication: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Title, headline, chapter name: none
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://web.lexis-nexis.com/universe/document?_m=932067cc2c9477d8265368eaaf223e98&_docnum=1&wchp=dGLbVlz-lSlAl&_md5=94b7fee3668929140a661c6a4953cdc9
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Sampson, Melanie B.