[Mosaic] came on very suddenly, it happened everywhere simultaneously, and it’s self-organizing. I call that the Web eating the Net.
Predictor: Pesce, Mark
Prediction, in context:For a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Erik Davis covers pagans and the Internet culture, interviewing Mark Pesce, the creator of VRML a technopagan from San Francisco. Davis writes: ”Pesce was blown away when he first saw Mosaic, NCSA’s powerful World Wide Web browser. ‘I entered an epiphany I haven’t exited yet.’ He saw the Web as the first emergent property of the Internet. ‘It’s displaying all the requisite qualities – it came on very suddenly, it happened everywhere simultaneously, and it’s self-organizing. I call that the Web eating the Net.’ Driven by the dream of an online data-storage system that’s easy for humans to grok, Pesce created VRML, a ‘virtual reality markup language’ that adds another dimension to the Web’s HTML, or hypertext markup language. Bringing in Rendermorphics Ltd.’s powerful but relatively undemanding Reality Lab rendering software, Pesce and fellow magician Parisi created WorldView, which hooks onto VRML the way Mosaic interfaces with HTML. As in virtual reality, WorldView gives you the ability to wander and poke about a graphic Web site from many angles.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Language/Interface/Software
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Technopagans: May the Astral Plane be Reborn in Cyberspace
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.07/technopagans_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney