Just think what the world will be like once any programmer in the world can write a globally distributed application and make it available on the net without any concern for grungy system calls and incompatible standards. We’ll have all kinds of interesting games, communications schemes, bulletin boards, databases, and whatever else happens to be widely enough adopted to reach a critical mass of users … The problem with this brave new world is that the new ease of writing global applications will be available both to the people I like and the people I don’t like. So we can have both global democracy and global surveillance, global community and global hierarchy, global interaction and global accounting. Better get going and spread around the kinds of applications you’d want the world to made out of.
Predictor: Agre, Phil
Prediction, in context:The June 1994 issue of The Network Observer, an online newsletter, carries an article titled “Company of the Month” by Phil Agre, TNO editor, who was, at the time, working in the Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. Agre writes:”The future is here, and every day you use computer networks that span the globe. So why is it so incredibly difficult to write globally distributed software applications? One reason is the heterogeneity of operating systems and network protocols, each obscure in itself and just about incommensurable with all the others. In a reasonable world you’d have a layer of software that sat on top of those incommensurable systems and provided you with a simple, uniform set of abstractions. The software would come in the form of a kernel that was always running in the background on every machine in the known world, talking to that machine’s operating system and hardware, keeping on top of all the weird interrupts and contingencies that come up, and shielding you and your applications from all of that nonsense, with the result that your application doesn’t even have to know what kind of machine or network it’s running on. Right? Right. Well, that world has arrived, and the software that brings about this blessed state of affairs is called Pipes Platform from a company called PeerLogic. Just think what the world will be like once any programmer in the world can write a globally distributed application and make it available on the net without any concern for grungy system calls and incompatible standards. We’ll have all kinds of interesting games, communications schemes, bulletin boards, databases, and whatever else happens to be widely enough adopted to reach a critical mass of users. The next step is for someone to write genuinely useable mailer software on top of a system like Pipes Platform. Listserv is okay, but it has an appalling interface and you have to be a hacker to use it. In the future, anybody will be able to create their own e-mail infrastructures, and we won’t be stuck with the small number of simple models of e-mail use that we have at the moment. The problem with this brave new world is that the new ease of writing global applications will be available both to the people I like and the people I don’t like. So we can have both global democracy and global surveillance, global community and global hierarchy, global interaction and global accounting. Better get going and spread around the kinds of applications you’d want the world to made out of.”
Biography:Phillip E. Agre was an associate professor of information studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, and has been the author of research studies on the Internet. He edited The Network Observer, an online newsletter on Internet issues. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Language/Interface/Software
Name of publication: The Network Observer
Title, headline, chapter name: Company of the Month
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/tno/june-1994.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Guarino, Jennifer Anne