Elon University
The prediction, in brief:

Wireless will yank the cords of an awful lot of companies who think they have it with LANS, TCP/IP, fiber, and cable. And who knows what is “beyond wireless?”

Predictor: Hughes, Dave

Prediction, in context:

In a 1994 article for Wired magazine, Dave Hughes, retired military officer and the founder of Montana’s Big Sky Telegraph system of network bulletin boards, writes: ”Wireless will yank the cords of an awful lot of companies who think they have it with LANS, TCP/IP, fiber, and cable. And who knows what is ‘beyond wireless?’ Perhaps some incarnation of Tesla’s crazy experiments in Colorado Springs in 1899, where he got electrical resonance using the earth as a transmitter, signals pulsating so strongly that they made a roar across the city and blew out the town’s power station? Maybe that annoying ‘noise’ around Santa Fe is a 14-year-old working on it. Change is driving everything. Chaos is the form. Maybe a fractal is more descriptive of a company than a spreadsheet.”

Biography:

Dave Hughes created the first free, modem dial-up, electronic democracy bulletin-board system in the world. It soon challenged and altered the way local city-wide politics were conducted. It was colorfully named “Roger’s Bar.” Within five years the world’s press had beaten a path to Hughes’ home to report on, and encourage others to adopt an entirely new model of “electronic democracy” Ð a model that could be adopted in any small town in America. Wired magazine said he was the best-known personality on the Internet in 1993. Microtimes Magazine named Hughes one of the 100 most influential individuals in the Computer Age six times between 1990 and 1996. (Pioneer/Originator.)

Date of prediction: January 1, 1994

Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure

Subtopic: Wireless Technologies

Name of publication: Wired

Title, headline, chapter name: Chaos is the Form

Quote Type: Direct quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.01/chaos_pr.html

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney