An Age of Optimism
The information superhighway may be mostly hype today, but it is an understatement about tomorrow. It will exist beyond people’s wildest predictions.
Subtopic: General
Reality Check
The Internet is not the key to the future. It’s not going to provide great, wonderful information. Instead, it will continue to provide a rather mundane view of our very, very mundane world.
To Dream the Internetworking Dream
The existence of trillions of dollars of business transactions globally that is thus far unenabled by electronic catalogs and auction markets must be keeping product designers up late trying to figure out how to unlock the treasures there.
Internet Hero Tries to Kick the Habit: Clifford Stoll Aims to Stir Up Some Skepticism About the Information Network
I’m not against the Internet. I just want people to be more skeptical about it. People are skeptical about nuclear power and genetic engineering and a lot of other areas but they blindly accept the Internet. We techies should be more honest about what computers can do and what they cannot do, or else we are setting ourselves up for a big pie in the face.
To Dream the Internetworking Dream
There are four categories of capabilities that are weak or non-existent on the public Internet that need to get fixed before we will see large amounts of company-to-company internetworking. The four areas are security, reliability, billing and navigation. Sure we have some pieces of each, but they all need to be made far more commercial-grade.
To Dream the Internetworking Dream
The trick will be to allow the enterprises to move data into and out of company enterprise networks as freely as they do now internally. I believe that will happen in five years.
To Dream the Internetworking Dream
Thus far we have only seen good internetworking for the computer professionals. The big challenge is to do this for other markets such as entertainment and business-to-business transactions.
20 Million Drive the Information Highway; It’s Time to Open the Internet to Every Computer User, Planners Say
The federal government, which spawned the Internet, has one foot in the organization and one foot out, clouding the issues of governance and, especially, the network’s commercial potential … Major questions, like: “Are any forms of communication to be restricted?” [and] “What about individual privacy rights?” have hardly been discussed, much less resolved. Protection of intellectual property rights is extremely difficult, a situation disliked by those whose primary interest in the information superhighway is commercial, but applauded by advocates of the unrestricted flow of information.
Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny
As we move into the world of mobile code, of secure systems, of network payment, the new principles are being, silently or not, laid down. These principles will define the behavior of a new machine, a new anthill, a new brain, which is the sum of ourselves and our creations. Vannevar Bush’s MEMEX was described as a complex machine. We see it now as a cog in a larger system. We feel fairly proud that we have built MEMEX-like machines. But now we have links, do we know what to do with them? When it comes to designing larger machine, we are still banging the rocks together. But we are at a time of great creativity, of great potential for change for better or worse, and there is a feeling that in fact we may be able to bring our collective teamwork up to a level at which we can ensure our survival.
Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny
Suppose … all these minor problems are cleared up, would we be seriously empowered as [Vannevar] Bush would like us to be, as a whole? Let’s think about scaling problems. Let’s think of some large numbers. The number of Web documents. The number of people in the world. The number of neurons in the brian. We’re thinking of lots of things all connected together. Web objects, people and neurons all have the ability to have random associations. The neurons seem to work (on a good day) as a integrated team. The people do in parts. The Web documents just sit there. But pretty soon the Web documents will start getting up and wandering around. So when Web objects become mobile, and start wandering around and interacting with each other, would you now put much money on them making sense as a whole?