From the Pioneers of Computers
People are getting used to conducting business where they don’t meet face-to-face. But people have not yet started building businesses assuming that. They will.
People are getting used to conducting business where they don’t meet face-to-face. But people have not yet started building businesses assuming that. They will.
Prohibiting the posting of e-mail advertisements into newsgroups with assigned topics under discussion would seem reasonable, because such inundation is disruptive, intrusive, and surely an invasion of the sanctity that the Supreme Court purportedly protected in Rowan v. United States Post Office Department … Prohibiting the delivery of commercial messages to e-mail destinations would seem consistent with the First Amendment’s goal of encouraging a diversity of information sources without intruding upon the sanctity of personal e-mail or autonomous-group cyberspaces.
The planet will not have to go to one lousy place [Microsoft] for desktop operating systems and productivity tools.
We want that advertising, but we want it at the time and place of our choosing.
Schools, now among the most intellectually barren of our institutions, would become true learning centers, linked to information resources throughout the world. Teachers, the nation’s only professionals who are routinely deprived of telephones at their workplaces, would be in close contact with both colleagues and vast amounts of data, enabling them to grow intellectually, and in doing so, model life-long learning for their students. And the students, now condemned to serving time in schools that all too often resemble prisons, would have access to a substantial portion of the world’s potential mentors and potential friends.
Telecomputing … can become an agent of educational reform, a kind of Trojan horse that quietly but thoroughly rearranges classrooms.
In the long term the most intriguing relationships may not be between agents and masters, but between agents and agents. The more agents there are, the more likely it is that they will deal with other agents. Although it is possible for all the agents to operate in isolation, it sounds wasteful. If thousands of agents are doing roughly the same sort of thing for their masters, why not pool resources?
Want to lose your shirt? Bet against the Internet … Because its architecture ensures that it cannot be easily controlled by the government, it will become the primary source of information for Joe Couchpotato. The printed newspaper and magazine will be forced to find new roles as radio did when TV took over as the primary source of entertainment.
As we get newer and better compression alogrithms for video and still-frame images, we’ll approach the next major leap in desktop computing: video on the desktop.
The information highway will be able to sort consumers according to much finer distinctions [than today’s television and print publications], and to deliver (to) each a different stream of advertising … Data can be gathered and disseminated without violating anyone’s privacy because the interactive network will be able to use information about consumers to route advertising without revealing which specific households received it … Some of the billions of dollars now spent annually on media advertising, and on the printing and postage of direct-mail advertising, will instead be divvied up among consumers who agree to watch or read ads sent directly to them as messages.