Elon University

Subtopic: General

The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun: Don’t Look Now, But Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServe Are All Suddenly Obsolete – and Mosaic is Well on its Way to Becoming the World’s Standard Interface

The goal is referential integration. You’ve got all these people, and people are cultural – the individual has cultural software that he is running. As that culture is expressed electronically, you can integrate it into the Web. You can build a knowledge base that can draw on the experience of not just the individual or a limited group, but a whole country or planet … The Web is destined to become not only omnipresent, but also, in a sense, omniscient.

The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun: Don’t Look Now, But Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServe Are All Suddenly Obsolete – and Mosaic is Well on its Way to Becoming the World’s Standard Interface

Different computers on the Web [will share] data in such a way that the most popular information is replicated onto many machines, while the least popular information lives on a single machine. Addresses, in the conventional sense, would disappear. No human being would know where any specific piece of information was stored. The Web would shift its data around automatically, while users could retrieve documents simply by knowing their names. The Web, in this scheme, becomes unlocatable and omnipresent.

Why Jim Clark Loves Mosaic: After Leaving Silicon Graphics, Jim Clark Wanted to Get Into the Interactive-Television Business, But Wasn’t Sure Where the Next Fire Would Strike. With Mosaic, Clark Thinks He Has Found the Spark

When the phone system was invented it was primarily for voice. We commercialized it when we began to use it for business, and we commercialized it further when we began to do data transfers over the wire, money transfers over telephone lines. It’s exactly the same thing. Commercialization of the Internet is as inevitable as the sun coming up tomorrow.

Billions Registered: Right Now, There Are No Rules to Keep You From Owning a Bitchin’ Corporate Name as Your Own Internet Address

How much do you think mcdonalds.com is worth? What could you sell mtv.com for? Is there gold in them thar domains, as a lot of people seem to think, or is it just fool’s gold? No one knows the answers to these questions … It’s easy to find an unused domain name, and so far, there are no rules that would prohibit you from owning a bitchin’ corporate name, trademarked or not.

Read Hundt: Wired Asks the Chair of the FCC About Cutting Cable Rates and Competition, Censoring Howard Stern, and John Malone’s Suggestion That He Be Taken Out and Shot

The information superhighway right now consists of our universal broadcast system, our almost-universal telephone system, our almost-universal cable system, our universal satellite system, and our virtually universal wireless system … All five will intersect, interconnect, overlap. And we will end up with a network of these networks.

Read Hundt: Wired Asks the Chair of the FCC About Cutting Cable Rates and Competition, Censoring Howard Stern, and John Malone’s Suggestion That He Be Taken Out and Shot

It is absolutely essential that the information highway be connected to every classroom and every clinic and every library in the country as soon as practical. Being on the information highway is the only way to participate fully in our economy. It is going to be essential for virtually all Americans. I want us to have a policy of connecting all classrooms for the beginning of any installation of broadband interactive services.

Persistence of Locality

I read about a software developer who has six continuous teleconferencing sessions running all day, every day, in windows scattered around the margins of his terminal … Eventually bandwidth will get cheap enough to allow almost all Net users to do something like this, and if they do, my experience suggests it will be longtime, local friends who will end up on their displays.