As the ’90s proceed, finding a link to the Internet will become much cheaper and easier. Its ease of use will also improve, which is fine news, for the savage UNIX interface of TCP/IP leaves plenty of room for advancements in user-friendliness. Learning the Internet now, or at least learning about it, is wise. By the turn of the century, “network literacy,” like “computer literacy” before it, will be forcing itself into the very texture of your life.
Computer networks worldwide will feature 3-D animated graphics, radio and cellular phone-links to portable computers, as well as fax, voice, and high-definition television. A multimedia global circus! Or so it’s hoped – and planned. The real Internet of the future may bear very little resemblance to today’s plans. Planning has never seemed to have much to do with the seething, fungal development of the Internet. After all, today’s Internet bears little resemblance to those original grim plans for RAND’s post-holocaust command grid. It’s a fine and happy irony.
[The Netscape-Java union will] invert the entire world of software in a way that may permanently displace Microsoft from the center of the sphere.
It will become critical for everyone to be connected. Anyone who doesn’t will essentially be isolated from the world community.
As an ink-stained journalist, I doubt it ever will replace the printed page, but businesspeople of all types and home users will take to the World Wide Web in increasing numbers. The Internet will be as pervasive as the air we breathe … By year’s end, it will be a permanent fixture, and you will go through withdrawals if you are on the Net every day. Surfing will give way to serious Web diving.
Technology may settle down fairly quickly because people just demand it; they can’t stand all the change. Or it may settle down later because it evolves, it comes to a point where people are kind of comfortable and a number of things hold still and that’s fine. Or it may simply not settle down at all. And then we’re forced to just become used to always surfing a constant wave; it’s never calm. And that would be a very interesting thing for civilization because we’ve never done that before … The great thing about the future under these circumstances is that it is fundamentally unknowable, and that’s both terrifying and very attractive.
We need … a firm idea of the kind of media environment we would like to see in the future.
As the power and scope of cyberspace become more and more obvious, its commercial potential grows … The growth of the Internet will be further boosted by recently passed federal legislation designed to bolster the development of a digital “information infrastructure.”
By the end of the decade [the year 2000], we will very likely have a highly robust and widespread infrastructure in place for purpose of telecommuting, information gathering and exchange, electronic commerce, remote teaching and learning, and general education. We may well find ourselves using the system for voice and video applications as well as group activities.
I have extracted three clues as to what the I-way will really be like … The first clue is: Follow the free. In the three decades that digital technology has been around, many of the most profitable businesses got going by exploiting services or products originally given away free … The second clue is: Let the copies breed. Whatever it is that we are constructing by connecting everything to everything, we know the big thing will copy effortlessly. The I-way is a gigantic copy machine. It is a law of the digital realm: anything digital will be copied, and anything copied once will fill the universe. Further, every effort to restrict copying is doomed to failure … The third clue is that it’s a new literary space, man.