How the Internet Didn't Fail As Predicted

Lord Byron Eee PC writes "Newsweek is carrying a navel-gazing piece on how wrong they were when in 1995 they published a story about how the Internet would fail. The original article states, 'Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.' The article continues to say that online shopping will never happen, that airline tickets won't be purchased over the web, and that newspapers have nothing to fear. It's an interesting look back at a time when the Internet was still a novelty and not yet a necessity."

Comments

The interwebs!

[spammeister]

The internet is "failing"...if all the big media fatcats have their way, the internet will have "failed".

Now the use of the term "internet" is far-reaching, so I suppose for all of it to actually fail, every backhoe in the world would have to find a buried pipe and start digging at the same time. But I digress...

Re:The interwebs!

[cayenne8]

I think the quote that gets me is: " It's an interesting look back at a time when the Internet was still a novelty and not yet a necessity."

Don't get me wrong, I tend to go into withdrawls if my connections go down for an extended period of time, but, the internet being a necessity? I dunno. There are plenty of people out there that live and breathe and make money with no connection or need to the internet whatsoever. I don't think it is truly a necessity like shelter and food.

While *I* would not want to live without it, people still can pretty easily these days.

Re:The interwebs!

[timster]

But in modern industrialized societies, hypothetically turning off the entire Internet would have secondary effects on those who don't use it in their daily lives or work. Not that people would die in large numbers or anything.

Re:The interwebs!

[Anonymous Coward]

Many public services are now dependent on the Internet. How do you think grocery stores coordinate deliveries? Even phone connections now go over the Net. The Internet may not be food and shelter, but without it your access to them would quickly be disrupted - good luck getting your money out of the bank to pay for groceries, or your mortgage, for example.

Re:The interwebs!

[Bakkster]

For example, don't you think that the automated and streamlined ordering systems that corporations use to reduce costs on necessary goods used by the poor would suffer?

It's necessary in the same way that roads and highways are necessary for the developed world. Sure, we could do without, but there would be a discernable difference if you removed either.

Re:The interwebs!

[Obfuscant]

But in modern industrialized societies, hypothetically turning off the entire Internet would have secondary effects on those who don't use it in their daily lives or work.

Don't let this scare you or anything, but you know about ham radio? That chunk of spectrum and users whose motto is "when all else fails"? Who spend time supporting disaster relief and emergency services?

A lot of those folks are putting their eggs in the internet basket, relying on the internet to get email through when local communications systems go down. If the local internet goes down, so local email won't get through, they're planning on using HF or VHF radio to get email out of the disaster area and into the hands of state and federal agencies.

If the internet goes down on a large scale, those messages will go nowhere, and the senders won't know that they aren't going anywhere.

What's even scarier is the draconian anti-spam measures being used. If you aren't on the radio user's whitelist and you don't know the secret code to bypass it, your email won't go through. The bounce message doesn't tell you the secret, and it doesn't alert the intended recipient that you tried. You could be Barack Obama himself, and if whitehouse.gov isn't in the recipient's whitelist, your email won't get delivered. Users in a disaster area who want to turn this feature off cannot.

Re:The interwebs!

[jbengt]

The internet is not a necessity in the sense that food and shelter are necessities.
But it is a necessity in the sense that automobiles and refrigerators are necessities of modern life.

Re:The interwebs!

[SydShamino]

Yes, but of the people to which you refer, how many of them earn their living providing services to others? And how many of those others depend on the internet for their jobs?

The crew who repaired my roof or the guy who changed my oil might not depend directly on the internet, but he depends on my money, which does depend on the internet.

Re:The interwebs!

[AlexCV]

When you use a credit or debit card at an ATM or in a store, a good chunk of those transactions now go through the internet. In 1995, they all dialed up/used leased lines to a packet switched network (DATAPAC, TYMNET, etc.) or a terminal bank. Your hypothetical Sally/Sam the Wallmart Greeter who doesn't use the internet works at a store where ordering, inventory, POS and other essential activities require an Internet connection.

Re:The interwebs!

[steelfood]

It's a matter of convenience. Things would be harder, and progress would be a little slower. A very small minority of people would feel the adverse impact in any significant way and they'll have to learn to live with it, but most people will go back to their televisions and newspapers and radios.

But it isn't as if everybody's going to go hungry all of a sudden, or if man-made structures are going to collapse.

Re:The interwebs!

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be careful with that perspective. Let's say that everything we call the Internet goes away instantly. There are a lot of business interconnects and processes that are based solely on those connections. Things would be pricier or not available if those connections go away. The Internet is FAR more pervasive than just buying stuff from the web and wikipedia

Re:The interwebs!

[JWSmythe]

Not that people would die in large numbers or anything.

That is actually arguable. With more companies using the Internet to coordinate tasks such as purchasing and shipping, and more dependence on VoIP for telephone service, you could have people dying.

That sounds silly, but consider a few things. Most essential products (food, clothing, shelter) are not sourced locally. While clothing and shelter do not need to be replenished daily, food is essential.

Most areas do not have sufficient production nor storage of food supplies for any sort of long term survival. Therefore, food must be brought in from those areas that are production areas. Huh? How many cows have you seen grazing in Manhattan? To the best of my knowledge, with the exception of maybe the Central Park Zoo, there are none. How many places can you buy milk, a hamburger, or steak? Ooohh, a whole lot. If the food supply were to be cut off to Manhattan, how long would the food supplies last? My best guess would be a week or two. Looters and hoarders will swing that to be a very wide range.

Quite a bit of the coordination of moving these food supplies are done over the Internet. But, moving the supplies is just one thing. Transportation requires fuel, vehicles, and workers.

Sure, it could maintain in a world without the Internet, but since quite a few facilities have migrated over to Internet based technologies for management, reinventing them without access to the previous resources may be virtually impossible.

I like to ask the same question about Los Angeles. Say there was a large earthquake, where the seaports and airports were rendered unusable, and major highways (I-5, I-10, I-15, CA-14, CA-1) were rendered useless (landslides, collapsed bridges, etc). How long could the Los Angeles area survive on it's own? It's a fair comparison. Isolation of the Internet, where the Internet is an essential part of the coordination of transportation for essential goods, is just as dangerous as if the physical routes to bring supplies in were rendered unusable. My guess (with a lot of math behind it) was honestly 1-2 weeks before dehydration and starvation became a serious problem. The Los Angeles area can't survive without pumping fresh water to the homes and businesses. In 4 to 8 weeks, there would be a very minimal population left.

Some people who lived there said, "we'd make it", until I spelled it out. They shifted to "We'll drive to ..." and they all had different directions. I broke the bad news to them. Millions of people will have the same idea, and most passenger vehicles are only designed for a 300 to 400 maximum range before refueling. They didn't get the reports that bridges or sections of roads were blocked. Putting millions of people on the road all trying to leave would unfortunately leave you parked, burning off what fuel you may have had before whatever incident happened. That of course was countered with "We'll walk." Good luck there. It's somewhere over 350 miles to get to the San Francisco area. 125 miles to the San Diego area. It could be pretty much assumed that they'd both be in the same predicament at that point. Las Vegas is only 256 miles, or Phoenix is 375 miles. There's a lot of dry areas, so unless you happen to have a mule to carry water for you, I wouldn't hold out hope to surviving the hike. Considering rest breaks, people generally walk about 2 miles per hour, and may be able to sustain that for 8 hours. Say you're feeling really ambitious, and walk without stopping for 16 hours per day, you may make it 100 miles in 3.5 days. Oh ya, you had to carry supplies to do that too. Lets ask the military how far they could expect in shape folks carrying supplies to walk every day...

"An infantry div on the march averages 12-15 miles per day, an armored div 100 miles per day."
- U.S. De

Re:The interwebs!

[Neoprofin]

Things would be harder, and progress would be a little slower. A very small minority of people would feel the adverse impact in any significant way and they'll have to learn to live with it,

You mean like all the people whose employments and skillsets depends in their entirety on the internet? Software developers? Hardware manufacturers? Not just the ones making routers and Ethernet cables, the ones who produce the next line of affordable budget systems designed to keep just ahead of the requirement curve for screwing around on Facebook. And all the people who sell these items? Tech support? The telecomms? Energy producers? Their suppliers? Online businesses?

No, it's not like if the internet was gone it'd be the same as the sun dying out, but in some crazy hypothetical situation where it suddenly disappeared the ramifications would be far more wide than not being able to read BBC news and watch YouTube videos.

Re:The interwebs!

[Patch86]

I disagree. You could say the same about the paved road network.

Yes, life would go on if we had to revert to 30mph single lane dirt tracks. Yes, you would be quite able to live your life individually by avoiding the road network (not own a car, not ride the bus). Yes there are alternatives to the road (rail, aircraft, canals, etc.).

But that doesn't mean the road network isn't a necessity. If it were ripped up right now today then there would be serious repercussions- even for the minority who doggedly never use it. Businesses would crumble, quality of life would drop.

If the internet were switched off tomorrow, there would be repercussions. Even if you never use it yourself, it would still effect you.

Re:The interwebs!

[QRDeNameland]

Well put. I recall reading an article some time back where some major executive was arrogantly dismissing the necessity of email and text messaging because *he* never used it, though he did acknowledge that his assistants did all his electronic communication. It was like someone claiming driving was unnecessary because they have a chauffeur.

Some people don't seem to get that just because they don't use personally use a specific innovation like the internet or evolutionary biology that they may still benefit from it or even be dependent on it.

Re:The interwebs!

[cayenne8]

"If the food supply were to be cut off to Manhattan, how long would the food supplies last? My best guess would be a week or two. Looters and hoarders will swing that to be a very wide range."

Hmm, many of your examples like this tend to make for good arguments that living in crowded, urban cities really isn't a good thing, if you are worried about survival in case of emergencies. I mean, just the other day, there was an article here about solar flares, which it seems we're overdue for.

So, if the internet is a necessity, especially for food and materials in a crowded suburban setting...a solar flare incident could put your life in jeopardy...well, I think I'd rather be more at least in a suburb where access to farmland/food isn't quite so bad?

Re:The interwebs!

[Draek]

A better example, I think, would be education. Living without cars is fairly easy overall (except in the US, you people are truly backwards when it comes to designing cities), but there's almost no way to achieve a good standard of living without education in today's age and the same can be said for the Internet.

Re:The interwebs!

[Shotgun]

Not if there isn't an infrastructure for televisions, newspapers and radios.

We could all go back to using horse drawn carriages if the fuel ran out tomorrow, right?

My brother-in-law is an executive for a printing company. He moved up through the ranks. Started out cleaning bathrooms, and spent years reloading ink into massive printers. His company like many others got bought up, and he has seen the company that bought his be bought by a yet larger company. Most large scale printing has been consolidated into a few large companies.

What has been the enabler? The Internet. Nearly everything is digital now, and the work flow goes from an artist work, to corporate approval, directly to the press. The industry could eventually return to a small guys in warehouses each with a few dozen employees, but that would be a long, hard trek backwards.

Re:The interwebs!

[Teancum]

I like to ask the same question about Los Angeles. Say there was a large earthquake, where the seaports and airports were rendered unusable, and major highways (I-5, I-10, I-15, CA-14, CA-1) were rendered useless (landslides, collapsed bridges, etc). How long could the Los Angeles area survive on it's own? It's a fair comparison. Isolation of the Internet, where the Internet is an essential part of the coordination of transportation for essential goods, is just as dangerous as if the physical routes to bring supplies in were rendered unusable. My guess (with a lot of math behind it) was honestly 1-2 weeks before dehydration and starvation became a serious problem. The Los Angeles area can't survive without pumping fresh water to the homes and businesses. In 4 to 8 weeks, there would be a very minimal population left.

Keep in mind that the first settlement to Los Angeles had the entire settlement wiped out.... due to starvation and a lack of water. I'm not talking a few people dying of disease, but that the place is simply inhospitable for even a small group of people to live there.... at least live there without massive public works and technology that brings in supplies and materials for you to live there. Los Angeles in particular is a prime example of what technology can do to help bring in resources that turns an inhospitable area into not only a place to live but to thrive and for population to explode.

The one semi-good thing is that Los Angeles can survive on 19th Century technologies (canals, aquaducts, railroads, etc.) if it absolutely needed to happen. I couldn't say the same thing about a similar sized city on the Moon or Mars, but Los Angeles is certainly "proof" that you can sustain a large population in a difficult to live-in climate. It also does help that the general climate there is relatively mild and that people enjoy living there simply because of its location, forgetting that LA is mostly a desert between some mountains. If you need any substantial "proof", try to find the Los Angeles River. It has been made fun of in countless movies, and is about as artificial as the rest of the city too. In the mid-west, it would be a brook that might not even have a name.

Re:The interwebs!

[NReitzel]

People can pretty easily live without toilets - billions of them do. Would one argue that a toilet is "not a necessity?" I think not.

If my internet connection were to evaporate, I have a slew of bills that would not get paid, at least for a while. The majority of my purchasing accounts are paperless, and I would not get statements. My bank account is electronic; I have not written a check in many years. I could go back, but it would be a Herculean effort.

OK, it's not necessary. Neither is a refrigerator.

Re:The interwebs!

[jo42]

Depends on your definition of "failed".

If you call a network full of privacy invading corporations, advertising, marketing and crap a "success", then by my definition, it has failed.

Re:The interwebs!

[sonicmerlin]

He moved up from janitor to... designated ink reloader? I was expecting a bit more "riches" in this rags to riches story.

Re:The interwebs!

[glwtta]

I don't think it is truly a necessity like shelter and food.

Well, sure, but nothing apart from from shelter and food is a necessity. People tend to claim all sorts of things like clothes, cars, computers as necessities to the way they want to live, but they could always procure food and shelter in ways that don't involve those (yes, even clothes).

Given the general tone of the article, I think this was meant in a business context: if you want to start virtually any type of business these days, having an internet component is a necessity.

Re:The interwebs!

[KnownIssues]

Considering air, food, water and shelter are all you really need, of course the Internet isn't in this list. But it's certainly far beyond novelty. It's certainly nearly an expectation. It's certainly such a core part of people's way of life that many would barely function, or function far less effectively without it. The same would be true of the television, radio, automobiles, phones, electricity, or anything else invented by man over the last 10,000 years. I think that's what we're talking about here when we say a necessity.

Re:The interwebs!

[Anonymous Coward]

...Even if you never use it yourself, it would still effect you.

For example, if the internet were down, you might not be able to look up the proper usage of certain words.

Re:The interwebs!

[ooshna]

He moved up from janitor to... designated ink reloader? I was expecting a bit more "riches" in this rags to riches story.

My brother-in-law is an executive for a printing company. He moved up through the ranks. Started out cleaning bathrooms, and spent years reloading ink into massive printers. His company like many others got bought up, and he has seen the company that bought his be bought by a yet larger company. Most large scale printing has been consolidated into a few large companies.

See we learned something today. Its called reading everything. Have a good day kids.

Re:The interwebs!

[JWSmythe]

    I used Los Angeles very intentionally. I lived there for a few years, and yes, what you said is absolutely correct. It was very rare to see water in the Los Angeles "river". The only time I can recall that I did see water in it was during their rainy season, which lasts for about 2 days. :) Ok, it's a couple months, where everything turns green. Otherwise, the only green in the area is created by the fact that every home with grass has sprinklers.

    If they did become isolated by a natural disaster such as we've seen a couple of recently in other countries, it would be catastrophic.

Re:The interwebs!

[akonbrew]

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Re:The interwebs!

[dimes2vines]

It is amazing how we don't die without our accustomed technology, but we do have withdrawals! I diconnected our cell phones in an effort to save money - for less than 1/2 the price of 2 cell phones and dial up internet, we could get high speed wireless and VoIP! IT is great when the wireless internet works because we do save money http://dimes2vines.com/2010/01/28/back-to-the-dark-ages/ but when it does not.... http://dimes2vines.com/2010/02/10/technology/

Re:The interwebs!

[Patch86]

You're lucky that was the only typo you had to correct. Felt like my fingers were made of uncooked bacon typing that. Not even been drinking as an excuse...

Interesting

[mewshi_nya]

I'd like to read this. /. needs more articles that are actually interesting to read. Maybe more about the past predictions, even? :)

Re:Interesting

[syrinx]

Here's a good past prediction: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23/1816257

Re:Interesting

[sconeu]

Love it:

"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."

Re:Interesting

[ustolemyname]

Priceless comment from that story

Apple is the Mercedes Benz or BMW of the computer industry. They deliver the best-designed products with "why didn't I think of that?!" features that eventually become commonplace on the Fords and Chevrolets of the computer industry. How many computer makers let you into the case without turning screws? ....

Apparently Apple disagreed with jcoleman (139158) regarding "easily openable case == design feature"

Or, "openable case == design feature"

Source

In all fairness, his remaining 6 points are fairly valid and some are responsible for Apple's success in the market today.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, the original iPod wasn't a big hit. It took a few revisions before it really took off.

Re:Interesting

[Requiem18th]

There is a difference, when that paper was released everybody could see past their BS and realize they were wishful-thinking.

The iPod *was* lame, as in, lacking features the competition has had since the beginning, the iPod "won" by means of a) Marketing and b) The iTMS.
By "won" I mean, being the biggest player, it is no the sole player by a long shot.

I don't have numbers to back this up, over half the media player owners I know own something else than an iPod, but I live in Mexico, does anyone can bring statistics about media players in the world or at least the US?

Re:Interesting

[BeardedChimp]

On the other hand some of the predictions on slashdot have been bang on such as Linus Says 2004 is the Year for Desktop Linux

Re:Interesting

[dunezone]

The iPod was pretty lame when it was introduced. Only worked on Apple, limited space, limited features, pretty much set the stage for most Apple products.

It was only until several years later when increased the storage, added color, and allowed it to work on PC did it take off.

Re:Interesting

[ColdWetDog]

Please don't tell me you're now just figuring this out?

See kids, this is the real reason you should Read the Fine Article!

Re:Interesting

[jedrek]

It also "won" because of the interface, something everybody on slashdot keeps ignoring. Do you remember what the interfaces of pre-ipod mp3 players were like? No comparison.

Re:Interesting

[jedidiah]

You mean the idea of ripping of the basic UI from a CD changer head unit?

I still prefer a varation on this theme that has buttons rather than a wheel.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. It was successful due to very good marketing. It didn't have any real advantage over the competition but the way it was marketed and the money invested in advertisement was really something in a completely different league than what the rest of the mp3 player manufacturers could do.

Re:Interesting

[Brannon]

What are you like 4 years old? It took off immediately like it was shot out of a cannon, faster than the Sony Walkman did--is that not fast enough for you?

Re:Interesting

[Ractive]

This could laughable if you are very superficial about it, but economical success or hype is not necessarily related to a good product, actually if you could perform a really impartial feature by feature (design, software, usability, DRM, format management, compatibility, value, etc) comparison between music players I'm sure the iPod will not come as the best, so back in the day, minus the hype and the financial success, the comment is actually quite logical.

Re:Interesting

[samkass]

Apparently Apple disagreed with jcoleman (139158) regarding "easily openable case == design feature"

Or, "openable case == design feature"

Apple knows their markets very well. The high-end Mac Pro tower is far, far easier to open and modify than any other tower case I've used. Lift a lever, pull away the side, and you have each access to everything. Because that's what most of the Mac Pro customers want. iPhone customers? Not so much.

Re:Interesting

[shadowfaxcrx]

Hey, Beanie Babies took off like they were shot out of cannons (oh don't we wish) too, but that doesn't mean they weren't lame as hell. "Bags of stuffed nothing going for hundreds of dollars!"

Actually sounds rather like an early iPod, doesn't it.

And comparing it to the Sony Walkman is disingenuous. The Walkman had to break into not only a whole new market, but had to convince people that there was a need for that market. And that wasn't overly easy because people in the 80's LIKED carrying their boom boxes around on their shoulder blasting their music for everyone else to hear. All the iPod had to do was convince people who were already sold on the concept of walking around with a personal music player that one with non-moving parts that can store everything without ever having to swap tapes or CD's is a pretty good innovation in a field that already has million of interested customers. And it was helped along by the fact that it was an apple product, and some people will buy anything with an apple logo on it. See: iPad.

Re:Interesting

[Juln]

Like the way they didn't even have a power button?

I spent some time playing with my friends original b/w iPod a few years back and actually, I couldn't figure out how to do anything. Then I spent three minutes trying to find the damn power button. Wow, that was an amazing design.

Re:Interesting

[cgoodric]

Oh, I beg to differ on this one. I would KILL to be able to replace my battery in my iPhone or plug in a memory stick (and save email attachments to it.)

Re:Interesting

[samkass]

Oh, I beg to differ on this one. I would KILL to be able to replace my battery in my iPhone or plug in a memory stick (and save email attachments to it.)

You are not most people.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

This kind of comment makes you look really dumb. Most of the rest of the world figured out how to use the iPod, what was your problem? Why couldn't you figure out how to do anything? You must be dumb. Just sayin'

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet you still own one, over and above any of their rivals' fine products.

Case and point there, really.

Re:Interesting

[mobby_6kl]

Yes, I remember. This is just a bunch of vague bullshit which gets accepted as the truth and modded appropriately only because it gets repeated all the time. Of course you can't compare the ipod to the cheap flash-based players of the time, but the Creative hard-drive based players had comparable, and I would say superior interface. Usually you'd have distinct physical buttons for most important functions, plus a rocker type thingie to navigate the menus. The menus themselves were clear and logically organized. Now admittedly the text input was a bit awkward, but at least it was possible to create and save playlists on the fly, as well as search songs by title.

Re:Interesting

[ImprovOmega]

If you RTFM it tells you all about that.

Re:Interesting

[Draek]

Except its interface is the same worldwide, yet there's a disproportionately high number of iPod owners in the US compared to the rest of the world.

Sorry, but the 'interface' argument just stinks of self-justification. If other players' interfaces were so poor, don't you think the entire world would've swiched over? or at least, in countries whose economies could hardly afford iPods, have significantly lower penetration rates of MP3 players? yet neither is the case, people in South America own just as many MP3 players as people up north, except it's $30 generic pendrive-with-a-screen chinese manufactured MP3 players instead of shiny, Apple-sanctioned $300 iPods

Or maybe we're just smarter than you, and therefore able to learn complex and daunting interface paradigms such as 'press the Play button to play' without Apple simplifying it for us.

Re:Interesting

[mdwh2]

Where's the prediction?

He calls it lame. That's not a prediction about it's success, it's an opinion about the product. A product being successful doesn't make that opinion wrong - unless you think Windows and IE are therefore the best ever?

Personally I prefer all the laughable predictions about how revolutionary products like the Air (remember that? Most people don't) was going to be. We still see this sort of thing today, with rumours over the Ipad and now Ikky.

Re:Interesting

[mdwh2]

I don't know, were they like the Shuffle?

Funny how an interface is all important when it has one, but when Apple drop that, suddenly not only is it not important, but the fact that they droped it is itself revolutionary.

Re:Interesting

[mdwh2]

So an interface is good because it's easy, but anyone who finds it hard is stupid? By that logic, all the other mp3 players had just as good a UI - if the OP found them difficult, he was obviously stupid, right?

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

The side panels on Mac Pros can be removed simply by opening a latch. Apple still makes easily "openable" cases for computers where that is a design feature.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume you mean the scroll wheel. The "menus with submenus" graphical UI was not only similar to existing computer design elements, but also awfully similar to what Creative was doing (thus the $100 million payout).

As for that scroll wheel, frankly the original "mechanical" design was pretty bad. The 2nd-gen touch-wheel was the real game changer. That and the size of the thing.

Re:Interesting

[ezeri]

Nope, it didn't really start taking off until late 04, early 05 as you can see here.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

The second-generation iPod, released just a little more than half a year later, added Windows compatibility. That's when it had a huge spike in sales.

That wasn't "several years later".

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

It took USB connectivity and PC connectivity to suddenly open it up to a larger user base.

Re:Interesting

[toddestan]

Well, the first time I played with an iPod, I didn't realize that the circle on the front was actually a capacitive sensor that I was supposed to run my fingers across to make the thing work. Once I figured that out, the rest was pretty easy, but still not a very intuitive design to someone who's not familiar with them - in that sense the old click wheel iPods were better.

Re:Interesting

[toddestan]

Don't you know your Apple history? The original iPod only worked on Apple computers, 2002 was a pretty low point when it came to the number of people using Macs.

Re:Interesting

[OrangeCatholic]

Aren't there buttons under the wheel? I know my Sansa has them. To fast-forward, you push right.

Re:Interesting

[OrangeCatholic]

Capacitive sensor? They probably did that to lower manufacturing costs.

Re:Interesting

[OrangeCatholic]

Clearly there's a social aspect to iPod ownership. I have a Sansa...beautiful color screen, cheap as hell, expandable, does video, and I'll bet the interface blows away an iPod's. It's irritating to look around the gym and see that EVERYONE has an iPod stuck to their arm. I mean, don't they realize that iPods are expensive?

As I'm getting older, I find the youth "herd mentality" more and more bizarre. It's like they're stuck in a bad dream. Must...Own...iPod...

A friend of mine was commenting the other day that all blond girls drive Jettas. Hmm. Glad I didn't notice.

Re:Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

if you could perform a really impartial feature by feature (design, software, usability, DRM, format management, compatibility, value, etc) comparison between music players I'm sure the iPod will not come as the best

It's pretty funny that you specifically mention "design, software, usability" (forgot size though). These are exactly the features that the iPod did far better than its competitors, and won it the bulk of the portable music market.

There is no objective "this is better" - at some point you have to assign subjective weights to your features. Is usability or size more important? All we have is the market results, and the market results show the iPod sells far far better than much cheaper portable music players with better "tech specs".

The zune is a perfect example: bigger hard drive, wireless, bigger physical size, bad usability, bad software. It's Cmdrtaco's comment incarnate. And it was awful. And it sold awfully. If you worked on the Zune team and that's where your comment is coming from, so sorry. No amount of blaming "hype" will account for the massive success of the iPod. Apple made a substantially better product, and created a market where none (outside us geeks) existed.

Re:Interesting

[Lunzo]

I agree that the interface on other players was acceptable, certainly no worse than the iPod. My iRiver from the same era as the original iPod is still going and the interface on that is perfectly fine. What it lacked compared to the iPod was iTunes to sync files and buy mp3s.

Re:Interesting

[Lunzo]

The original iPod had a hard disk for storage. Hard disks have moving parts. The flash based ones came much later (and the first generations of those sucked, anyone remember the iPod shuffle?).

Re:Interesting

[KaptajnKold]

the money invested in advertisement was really something in a completely different league than what the rest of the mp3 player manufacturers could do.

Which begs the question: Why has the Zune not overtaken the iPod yet?

Re:Interesting

[cgoodric]

Actually, a LOT of people I know who have iPhones have this same complaint. Don't get me wrong, I love the iPhone and the lack of these features was not enough to prevent me from getting one. It's just that it would have made the product that much better to have it.

Re:Interesting

[jedrek]

http://www.anythingbutipod.com/archives/images/10-years-of-mp3/creative-nomad-jukebox.jpg

Are you serious?

Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too

[Shuh]

A big-wig at I.B.M. predicted the entire world market for computers would be restricted to about 5 units.

Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too

[T Murphy]

He's right you know. Those computers were the size of rooms. As demand went beyond 5, they started dividing those computers up into smaller ones. Ever wonder why computers are always getting smaller? They are running out of those 5 original computers, so they have to go smaller and smaller in order to stretch them further.

Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too

[CannonballHead]

People who think they are very self-important tend to underestimate the impact of things they did not directly influence. Perhaps he was not involved with the PC and thus thought it was destined to failure. You think I'm crazy? Not so. Just think of the old adage, "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself" and similar such phrases. True in some cases, sure... but the more self-important one starts seeing one's self, the less able that person is to view the innovation of others as worthwhile and lasting.

Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too

[CaptainOfSpray]

How young are you, friend? The quote does not refer to that piece of Johnny-come-lately unarchitected junk called the PC. The IBMer referred to was Tom Watson Senior, talking in the 50's about the IBM 600. At that point in time, the price of a computer was such that only very few (perhaps 5) customers would both have the dough and see any reason why they should buy one. Back then, no-one had any idea at all about how to justify the purchase by displacing costs, never mind justify by competitive advantage.

What happened next: not 5, but 18 customers bought one. So IBM designed a bigger faster model, the 650. The pricing team begged to set the price on the assumption that 23 customers would buy one. Finance refused to allow any assumption other than that the 18 customers for the 600 would buy a replacement 650. In fact, over 600 were sold of the model 650. This brought in such a huge mountain of money that IBM could bet on the design of a range of compatible models, the System/360. The rest is history - if you look at the horizon, you can still see the peaks of the mountain range of money that the S/360 brought in.

Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too

[Anonymous Coward]

People who think they are very self-important tend to underestimate the impact of things they did not directly influence. Perhaps he was not involved with the PC and thus thought it was destined to failure.

Well even if it wasn't a misquote, that quotation supposedly originated in 1943. I don't think anyone was working on personnel computers back then, so we should excuse Mr. Thomas J. Watson from considering market that wouldn't exist until after he died! So your sentiment, while laudable, is rather misdirected in this instance.:P

Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too

[Rei]

One of my favorites was from Danny Hillis, a pioneer in parallel computing. "I went to my first computer conference at the New York Hilton about 20 years ago. When somebody there predicted the market for microprocessors would eventually be in the millions, someone else asked, 'Where are they all going to go? It's not like you need a computer in every doorknob!"

Years later, Hillis went back to the same hotel. He noticed that the room keys had been replaced by electronic cards you slide into slots in the doors. There was indeed a computer in every doorknob..

Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too

[Eggbloke]

A big-wig at I.B.M. predicted the entire world market for computers would be restricted to about 5 units.

'But I predict that within one-hundred years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will be able to afford one....'

Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too

[tverbeek]

What makes their not-gonna-happen predictions especially bad is the fact that some of those things were already happening in 1995.

Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too

[Chris Mattern]

Actually, no, he didn't. But it makes a nice urban legend. As a footnote, he supposedly said it in 1943, which would mean his prediction was correct for about ten years, which is better than a lot of people have done forecasting technological progress.

Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too

[Luyseyal]

Haha awesome!

-l

Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too

[cmburns69]

The solution to the looming computer shortage is to have more and more people share each of these remaining computers. I have developed an optimal technique for sharing (I call it Normalized Access Time, or NAT for short).

An alternate solution might be to just build more computers, but I'm not sure the infrastructure is in place for that yet.

Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too

[CannonballHead]

Well there you go, I stand corrected. Yes, I'm young. But not self-important enough to think I can't be wrong. :)

And pretty young. I was not around in the 50s. ;)

Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too

[Colin Douglas Howell]

While the basic theme of your story is correct, you're confused on a number of details.

Other posters have already pointed out that the remark attributed to Watson appears to be a misquote, though the section of Wikipedia's article on Watson discussing the quote does mention the initial sales results (18 machines vs. a prediction of 5) which you refer to. However, you seem to have confused IBM's 600 series of electromechanical punched-card calculators with its 700 series of large-scale electronic computers. The machine in question was not the IBM 600 (an electromechanical multiplier introduced in 1931) but the IBM 701, the first IBM electronic computer produced in quantity. This was a very large, expensive machine designed for scientific and technical calculations; its market was similar to that of the supercomputers of later decades.

The IBM 650 was not a bigger, faster version of the 701; that was the IBM 704. The 650 was a much smaller, cheaper machine designed for customers who could not afford a large-scale computer system. In that sense it was the predecessor to other later small-scale computer systems like the IBM 1620 and the DEC PDP-8. The 650 was sold as a replacement for IBM's earlier 600 series of punched-card calculating machines.

I don't know where your estimated and actual sales numbers for the 650 came from, but they appear to be incorrect as well. However, the machine was indeed far more successful than IBM's original sales predictions for it, with over 2000 being produced. But since it was a relatively low-cost system, I suspect that IBM's "mountain of money" available for the System/360's development was mainly brought in by other products, such as their 700 and 7000 series computers.

No, I wasn't around in the 1950s. I'm just a computer history nut. :)

Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too

[Darinbob]

I think with the right perspective, both that claim and the internet claim were mostly right, and their mistake was in not seeing the change in society. The internet as it existed in the two decades before 1995 were not the sort of thing you could predict the average technically illiterate person to go nuts over, and the computers from 1950s were also things that you would never imagine to be household items (much less multiple computers in some households). The definition and scope of these things have changed.

For instance, a computer that filled a room is impractical for the average person to own at home. But even beyond that a miniaturized version of that computer is still impractical. The typical home computer user doesn't need to calculate artillery trajectories, tabulate the US census, or design a nuclear bomb. Even when the first micro computers were invented, the typical home computer had little use for those toys, and the main frame and mini computers of even the early 80s were too esoteric. You didn't need a computer to type memos, that is what typewriters were for (and high end typewriters did a far better job of it for a fraction of the price). You didn't need a computer to add numbers, that's what a calculator or adding machine were for. Even when IBM PCs started invading the workplace few people saw these as devices for the home or for more than the financial number crunchers.

The average person does not need or want a calculating machine. What changed is the emergence of the killer app of the web browser. The "calculating machine" turned into an information device and an entertainment device. We had internet before the browser, the loose collection of networks let people send email internationally or read news, exchange information, etc. But it was pointless for the average person who had no access, so it was the domain of universities and research institutions and some corporations. What's the point of an extremely expensive device to send email to Aunt Margaret when you could just phone her instead? What changed after 1995 was just a mass change in public attitudes towards computers, so that they were no longer geek toys. As soon as a critical mass of people were connected it became useful to the masses and its use use blossomed.

In some sense, it's still incredibly illogical. Incredibly powerful "calculating machines" being used for entertainment purposes, a complex interconnection of high speed links designed through military funding is being used to get news before the morning paper arrives. Inconceivable! I do think that if the graphical browser went away completely that the computer and internet would go back to what it was before 1995; tools for engineers and researchers and hobbyists and nerds.

(speaking of, the early telephone companies assumed their invention was going to be a business tool and were surprised and annoyed when a large chunk of the bandwidth was taken up with chatting and gossip)

Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too

[Anonymous Cowpat]

And predated transistors. If computers were still powered by valves there probably would only be demand for a handful of them.

Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too

[whipnet]

Those computers where the size of buildings actually, so we still have plenty of computer to spread around. Get your facts straight.

*

Re:Computers Were Supposed To Fail Big Too

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure if card locks have an actual general purpose CPU in them or not (though they easily could).

But the number of devices that DO have general purpose CPUs in them is staggeringly huge these days compared to, say, 1980, or even 1995. The number of running CPUs on Earth probably outnumber humans by now - that'd only require, say, the wealthiest two billion humans to average a little under 3.5ish CPUs each.

I live in a middle class household of four adults and we're not big spenders, but... two desktop computers (five cores between them), three laptops (one from work)(five or six cores between them), two cellphones (one from work), one cablemodem, one router, two digital cable boxes, two HDTVs, two graphing calculators, four game consoles (old ones, but they do have general purpose CPUs), two handheld game systems (also oldish but with CPUs). Multiple cars under ten years old. Ignoring multicore-ness that's still over five CPUs per person for us. Those are just the obvious ones, and there are lots of other obvious cpu-based devices that we don't have but other households do (any midrange or better mp3 player, the newer digital cameras, ebook readers, and digital video cameras come to mind). And that's just households; businesses and government offices and schools and hospitals and infrastructure are all computer permeated too.

In 1995, I barely ever even saw cell phones - maybe one person in a sufficiently large public crowd would have one - and now very nearly everyone under 60 seems to have one. In 2025? It seems obvious that there will only be more chips in things, probably some form of wireless radio too. Every card in your wallet a smartcard, for example. Some automatic time synch receiver in your wristwatch and probably a fair amount of memory for your other personal devices to tap on demand (it seems like one of the most sensible candidates for device-shared storage - it's strapped on to you, so hard to lose, yet culturally fashionable). Probably a lot more ebook readers, or successor devices in about that format serving that role plus new roles. "Smart" household appliances reacting to the parts of their environs relevant to their tasks, or at least to the status of the power grid; maybe just the fridge, but possibly all the way down to the light fixtures (perhaps LEDs scaling brightness and color to the ambient lighting conditions and the time of day). I'm trying to stick only to the blatantly obvious here, but there'll certainly be at least one thing that would seem silly to suggest today yet will be ubiquitous and obvious by 2025, since we've had multiples of those every decade for the last several decades...

It's all about the Editor

[Cytotoxic]

from the original article

What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading.

And along comes Slashdot et al with moderation and meta-moderation schemes to allow the crowd to edit the stream. Problem solved (sort of). Hard to imagine that it was impossible to see lack of editing as anything other than an insurmountable obstacle. But the article was written by journalists with editors, so maybe that explains their limited vision.

Re:It's all about the Editor

[tpstigers]

And yet, for most users, the Internet IS a wasteland of unfiltered data. I would argue that there are far more people online that "don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading" than those who do know.

Re:It's all about the Editor

[Anonymous Coward]

Even if it takes more time, from an idealistic standpoint it should be up to the user to choose what is important and what is not. Bonus points for true transparency, openness, and comprehensiveness of the data.

Re:It's all about the Editor

[jedidiah]

This is the big failure of conventional journalism. They leave out a lot of important details and get what's left badly wrong. Just about any subject matter expert that examines the output of journalism as it relates to their specialty will find journalism shockingly bad. I suspect this is the true genesis of the demise of corporate journalism. The more interconnected people become, the more able people are to communicate about this sort of thing. People from different walks of life can share with each other just how WRONG journalists are.

Re:It's all about the Editor

[jmyers]

The worst part is what journalist intentionally left out due to bias and protecting their own interests. Now when people hear something important on the news they are likely to look it up on the internet to get the unfiltered details. Of course if it is controversial then they will go to the sites that feature the bias of their choice. At least there is choice and alternate views available.

Re:It's all about the Editor

[blahplusplus]

The great irony is that nothing changed, "professionals" were always biased, Wikileaks had more scoops on important issues then all major newspapers had in decades. "amateurs" = 1, Pro's = 0, the internet has it's drawbacks because anyone can open their mouth but it also means ANYONE WHO KNOWS can open their mouth in response, discussion has added so much to news stories and propaganda and newspapers basically had to add user comments or risk having less of an audience and less investment in their site. It' hilarious that thesE MARKET NEEDS were never catered to by so called private sector, sites run by passionate people were copied and mimicked by the business world.

Re:It's all about the Editor

[jdgeorge]

This is the big failure of conventional journalism. They leave out a lot of important details and get what's left badly wrong. Just about any subject matter expert that examines the output of journalism as it relates to their specialty will find journalism shockingly bad. I suspect this is the true genesis of the demise of corporate journalism. The more interconnected people become, the more able people are to communicate about this sort of thing. People from different walks of life can share with each other just how WRONG journalists are.

There are journalists who are insightful and thorough, journalists who produce large quantities of poor quality output, and there are journalists with undisclosed biases or agendas. In these respects, conventional journalists are identical to "unconventional" journalists (independent internet journalists writing for small internet publications or blogs).

I'd argue that there isn't any more "conventional" journalism; all mass media publications are now easily subject to the same review/critique as the independent media, in near real time.

What you've pointed out is that most non-experts in a given field have a hard time understanding and accurately representing even slightly complex information from a given field of specialization. This difficulty is no different for "journalists" than it is for other non-experts. The problem is not that journalists are prone to be misunderstanding, but that people in general are prone to misunderstanding.

This is why the most respected "journals" are (and have been) "peer reviewed", that is, subject to review by other experts in the same field, before publication. So, why don't we call those experts "journalists"? The do publish in journals, after all.

Re:It's all about the Editor

[Anonymous Coward]

You apparently don't know who Clifford Stoll is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll

Cuckoo's Egg is a great read, even now.

Re:It's all about the Editor

[Anonymous Coward]

What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don't know what to ignore and what's worth reading.

And along comes Slashdot et al with moderation and meta-moderation schemes to allow the crowd to edit the stream. Problem solved (sort of). Hard to imagine that it was impossible to see lack of editing as anything other than an insurmountable obstacle. But the article was written by journalists with editors, so maybe that explains their limited vision.

You must be new here.

Re:It's all about the Editor

[Patch86]

Perhaps more importantly, the internet also gives us access directly to the experts in each field.

Traditionally, a journalist (who may be very good, or he may not be) will ad-lib a long article on a subject, interspersing it with quotes and snippets from all the various sources. Perfectly valid, perfectly acceptable, pretty damned flawed.

These days an aggregator service (hi Slashdot!) posts a very short summary with links to the various blogs and feeds of the people who traditionally were only a 3-quote-source.

Why read about a scientific study in your daily rag when instead you can read the blogs (and counter blogs) of the scientists actually involved? Why read articles about a trade show when you can hear directly from the people who were actually there?

I don't think it's "the death of the paid journalist", but I think it'll inevitably cull their numbers. A lot of the easier leg work simply doesn't need doing any more.

Re:It's all about the Editor

[hitmark]

the more money someone have, the more risk averse they become. End result, corporations, including media corporations owning news media, are some of the most risk averse lot one can find. Dont rock the boat...

Wish he was wrong about the salespeople

[RobertB-DC]

From TF95A:

Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet--which there isn't--the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

Oh, how I wish the network were still missing that "essential ingredient". On the page containing the 1995 lament, I now see ads for:
* Hugh Downs' Artery Cleaning "Secret" (now with 50% more Nobel Prize Laureate!)
* Acai Berry Exposed - Official Test
* Drivers from Minnesota wanted! (of course, I'm in Dallas... with a MN proxy server)
* Saint Paul - Mom Lost 46lbs Following 1 Rule (MN mislocalization again)
* DON'T Pay for White Teeth (with the requisite sugar cube clenched in teeth, WTF?)

Meanwhile, *my* neighborhood mall -- the first air-conditioned mall west of the Mississippi -- is now a grass-covered field.

That said, I don't think I could go back to 1995, though it would be a fun challenge. The best part was doing DNS reverse lookups of domain names, since the company's network didn't have a DNS server. I could read David Letterman's Top Ten list the next morning, if I plugged the right octets into something called "Netscape" -- I thought I was livin' large.

Re:Wish he was wrong about the salespeople

[Arthur Grumbine]

Oh, how I wish the network were still missing that "essential ingredient".

Wish no longer!

Re:Wish he was wrong about the salespeople

[Admiral_Grinder]

Is it me or did that sound like a sales pitch?

Re:Wish he was wrong about the salespeople

[egcagrac0]

The best part was doing DNS reverse lookups of domain names

Isn't that a forward lookup?

Reverse DNS Lookup should turn a number into a name. A lookup turns a name into a number.

(Yes, there's always one in the group. I'm usually him.)

Re:Wish he was wrong about the salespeople

[RobertB-DC]

Isn't that a forward lookup?

I think you're right! It's been a while, so I couldn't remember. Reverse lookup is what I do *now*, to see where my spam comes from. Cool, thanks.

Re:Wish he was wrong about the salespeople

[Trouvist]

You should go reread the GP's post. He was typing "octets" into Netscape... I believe that refers directly to IP adresses... or do IP addresses not use octets in quadruple anymore?

Re:Wish he was wrong about the salespeople

[OrangeCatholic]

>That said, I don't think I could go back to 1995

That's a good question, actually. How have things improved since the 90's?

WHAT'S CHANGED:

Slashdot is less trolled, more predictable
Better shopping sites with reviews (Amazon, Newegg)
Wikipedia replaces Everything2
Google replaces AltaVista
Bittorrent replaces ftp://
Connection speed wayyyyy up
Comments on anything, anywhere
Insane amounts of Flash games
XML/DOM/Jscript is sweet, if you still care by now
Pretty much every TV clip is on YouTube
Newspapers have gotten worse
Everyone blogs
Everything is db-backed with a PHP forum on top of it
Craigslist
All idiots have been corralled into MySpace/FB where they will be electronically set on fire

HASN'T CHANGED:

Pricewatch
ArsTechnica
Yahoo!
Slashdot still buggy, worst codebase ever.
Web pages do not render instantaneously
Most news articles still do not contain pictures
Still reading news online
HTML maxed out at 4.01
Still no videophone
Still not using a Microsoft browser
Still using a Microsoft OS
Still credit-card shopping
Checking email still crucial

Re:Wish he was wrong about the salespeople

[RobertB-DC]

Hmm, thinking about this way too much, and trying to remember things that I haven't had to do in a decade and a half.

I found a page (think it may have been on the local network) that would let me let me enter, say, "tonightshow.com" (he also had an online presence then). It would spit back something like 66.77.124.26. I would go to http://66.77.124.26/ and -- if I was lucky -- the site would appear. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

And of course, if it did, it would be a bunch of plain text -- nothing like the multimedia experience you get now by going to http://tonightshow.com/ . Not even so much as a font specification. But it was still a huge step up from the StarText BBS.

Anyway, though... I got that IP address from "tonightshow.com" by using an online site that said "Forward DNS Lookup - Look up a domain name's IP". So I think I was wrong when I said "Reverse lookup", and the response was right.

Re:Wish he was wrong about the salespeople

[egcagrac0]

Makes perfect sense. Name-based host sharing; there's a webserver tied to the IP address that hands back different websites depending on what name you use to get there.

If the name you use is an IP address, expect a boring default site.

The more you know...

Negroponte

[gibson123]

If you have not done so, a must read is Negroponte's book "Being Digital", it's amazing how far in the future he can look, one of the best books talking about digital technology I've read, still, 15 years later: http://www.amazon.com/Being-Digital-Nicholas-Negroponte/dp/0679762906

Government crackdowns

[Wowsers]

Did they predict that governments will attempt to crack down on free speech on the internet by dreaming up fake terror threats and copyright nonsense to control the internet, and thus please the governments corporate whore masters?

Re:Government crackdowns

[Tanktalus]

Nah. That was predicted back in 1949. Though he was off by a few years on the actual timeline.

Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[Cytotoxic]

From the original internet criticism:

What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another.

So he was able to see that human contact was the thing that was missing from the internet - and then blew it. Because of his lack of vision, he's still eating Ramen Noodles. Meanwhile Zuckerberg and Tom Anderson and many others made billions on Facebook and Myspace etc. solving exactly those problems.

Actually, that's a nice lesson for the Slashdot crowd. Remember that idea you were just panning as stupid and unworkable because of xyz flaw that only you could spot? Yep, that's opportunity knocking.

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

Facebook and Myspace count as human contact?

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[ElectricTurtle]

You point was so insightful I sent the link to my wife. No doubt you will be moderated rightly into orbit, but due to lack of points not by me.

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[Marcika]

From the original internet criticism:

What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact. Discount the fawning techno-burble about virtual communities. Computers and networks isolate us from one another.

So he was able to see that human contact was the thing that was missing from the internet - and then blew it. Because of his lack of vision, he's still eating Ramen Noodles. Meanwhile Zuckerberg and Tom Anderson and many others made billions on Facebook and Myspace etc. solving exactly those problems.

Actually, that's a nice lesson for the Slashdot crowd. Remember that idea you were just panning as stupid and unworkable because of xyz flaw that only you could spot? Yep, that's opportunity knocking.

And he didn't have much of an excuse to bemoan the lack of human contact and virtual communities either... Cliff Stoll back then was a net guru and quite active on usenet, so it's not like he wouldn't have imagined how the net connects people...

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[characterZer0]

Zuckerberg and Anderson are not rich because they had vision to bring human contact to the internet.

Zuckerberg and Anderson are rich because they realized that most internet users cannot or will not learn to use use their computers well enough to handle an email application, an IM application, a news reader, and a web browser, and that most internet users are not online for content but for mindless entertainment.

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

Watching dudes whack their 3 inch dongs on Chat Roulette gives you all human contact you could ever want. :-)

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[Hurricane78]

Actually, ICQ solved that problem in 1996! It already had the ability to create user profiles, (chat) groups, and search for people with similar interests. Then came the imitators (AIM, MSN, etc), who chose to imitate it in a way that was basically only good for instant messages anymore.
And then, much much later, came Facebook, MySpace, etc. Who did the same thing. Except in the crappy website fashion. Plus they sold off the users’ data.

Meanwhile, I still use ICQ. (Amongst others like XMPP or IRC.) Via Kopete, but still...

P.S.: Perhaps you could say, that IRC preceded them all. But IRC did not really have much of a user profile and matchmaking functionality. But it could have easily. Sad that that was missed.

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[Anonymous Coward]

WRONG: zuckerberg is rich because he executed the textbook downward market expansion perfectly and repeatedly until he had a majority market share. If you'll recall, he first offered facebook only to the most exclusive crowd: Harvard students. He then moved on to the rest of the ivies, other top-tier schools, mid-tier schools, and so on until your grandma was eligible to sign up. That's why he won, facebook didn't have any technical advantage at first.

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[kristjansson]

You know, if Clifford Stoll is eating Ramen at this point, I think it's because he wants to... I also have to wonder if everybody here is really this ignorant of who the man is...

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[nine-times]

So he was able to see that human contact was the thing that was missing from the internet - and then blew it. Because of his lack of vision, he's still eating Ramen Noodles. Meanwhile Zuckerberg and Tom Anderson and many others made billions on Facebook and Myspace etc. solving exactly those problems.

Well they haven't really solved those problems. Nobody has solved those problems yet. Instead, I'd say they did something like... provide us with such an addictive semi-social activity that we don't realize how isolated we are. It is indeed very clever and profitable.

Reading and posting on a social networking site is not "human contact". Maybe we will someday have such a terrific VR system on the Internet that we can emulate genuine human contact and provide most of the physical/psychology health benefits of interacting people other people, but Facebook aint it.

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[glwtta]

Meanwhile Zuckerberg and Tom Anderson and many others made billions on Facebook and Myspace etc. solving exactly those problems.

I have to wonder if he wasn't talking about something more fundamental than "lack of user profiles". Saying that Facebook et al outright "solved" the problem of substituting communication for human contact seems a little short-sighted.

"Computers and networks isolate us from one another."

That quote annoys me about as much as any snide aphorism would, but there's some truth to it, as well.

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[Cytotoxic]

Actually, I was ignorant of his existence. Thanks for the link. He sounds like a pretty cool guy. By his bio it seems that he had his fingers on several great opportunities that he failed to grasp, yet still managed to make quite a nice life for himself. I could say the same about myself.

That's one of the things that I don't understand about the "social warfare" crowd. I come from modest means and have literally missed dozens of opportunities to get rich. Some because I just didn't want to go that route (I had a buddy go into internet porn in the 90's. He's rich now.), and most because I just flat didn't take advantage of what was in front of me (usually because I didn't think I could overcome all of the obstacles I was able to imagine). And I still managed to do fairly well for myself and my family.

Life is full of opportunity - it's just hard to grasp when you are in the moment. If we were all judged by the ratio of our actual performance to our maximum potential, we'd probably do equally poorly, whatever our social status.

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[Cytotoxic]

Reading and posting on a social networking site is not "human contact". Maybe we will someday have such a terrific VR system on the Internet that we can emulate genuine human contact and provide most of the physical/psychology health benefits of interacting people other people, but Facebook aint it.

You're right! There's a business opportunity..... no, wait.... Google says there's something called WoW that people do. Apparently, they WoW around the clock and even get married in WoW. Dang, too late again.....

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[nine-times]

WoW isn't "human contact" either. Video chat is getting close, since you can actually see people, but it's still psychologically and experientially different than sitting in the same room as someone.

When you have VR where you can feel the sensation of giving a hug, holding a hand, and elbowing someone in the ribs (unscripted and natural gestures), then we'll talk.

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[TheSync]

Cliff Stoll back then was a net guru and quite active on usenet, so it's not like he wouldn't have imagined how the net connects people...

I hooked up with chicks I met through Usenet back in 1992...

I'll admit that although I was building some of the earlier E-commerce Web sites in the mid-90's that I was totally blown away by the first time I saw a URL on the side of a bus. I thought the Internet would be huge, but even I didn't realize quite how huge.

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[Neoprofin]

Exactly. At its start Facebook was vastly inferior to services like Myspace, but by creating an environment for people to contact people they already have a basic connection with with a clean standardized interface and with registration requirements that at least in some respects weeded out "social undesirables" he was able to tap a whole new market and gradually use it to tear into the industry Goliaths.

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[Darinbob]

That's part of the scientist's and engineer's problem in this field (ie, Clifford Stoll). Stupidity does not often stand in the way of success. The intelligence that is needed is the ability to sell a stupid idea to the masses. Ie, the Pet Rock. Scientists and engineers are not the best people to go to for stock picks.

The lack of human contact is a major flaw in the internet, and yet people keep coming up with ways around that, ways to ameliorate it, and ways to substitute for it. It succeeds despite the flaw and despite the fact that it's a product people don't need.

Perhaps only cynics could have foreseen the success of the internet?

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[mdwh2]

Indeed - and Facebook/MySpace weren't even first with web based social networks, there were plenty before them (I think Six Degrees was one of the earliest, launched in 1997.)

The point is that being most successful isn't just about having the idea first, there are many other factors. Consider, if I went back 10 years, does that mean I could write Facebook and now be rich? Probably not - chances are I might stumble or be unlucky on any number of factors, and lose out to someone else. I mean, what did SixDegrees do wrong that Facebook did right? I don't think it was that people didn't hear about it - I remember SixDegrees sweeping through my University, and we all joined. But we just got bored with it rather quickly, and couldn't see what it offered, that we weren't already able to do with email.

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[Hillgiant]

Precisely. Back in the day we used Gopher to find our pictures of women with onions on their belt. AND WE LIKED IT JUST FINE.

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[Quirkz]

Zuckerberg and Anderson are not rich because they had vision to bring human contact to the internet.

Zuckerberg and Anderson are rich because they realized that most internet users cannot or will not learn to use use their computers well enough to handle an email application, an IM application, a news reader, and a web browser, and that most internet users are not online for content but for mindless entertainment.

Ah, you're both right. Honestly, I think the real key is, in the interim what counts as "human contact" has changed. Half of the ground was made up by the internet. Broadband has allowed us to take in a lot more a lot faster, and also put up a lot more. It's not just words, it's picture, it's videos, it's sound. You can play games together. (I can't tell you what a joy it was the first time I could play scrabble with my brother 1000 miles away, for instance. Nevermind skyping with my 93-year-old grandmother.) There's a lot more real contact to be had now than there was then.

I think the other half has been made up by people becoming willing to loosen the definition of "human contact." Particularly for younger people who have grown up with it, the digital interface IS contact with someone else. I'm not quite middle aged, and have adjusted some. I still don't think anything tops being there in person, but I can feel pretty connected from my web contacts. I've got "friends" I've never met in person and don't ever expect to. I've had business partners, or business clients, who I've never met in person -- though I don't think I've ever done business without at least one phone call.

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[OrangeCatholic]

Lol. Exactly.

Now the question becomes, is Chat Roulette better or worse than going outside and talking to the neighbors?

WELL...I am indoors, online. So that should tell you something.

I would prefer to be outside, but I ACTUALLY LIKE YOU PEOPLE BETTER.

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[OrangeCatholic]

Seriously. If you can get bored with MySpace (and I have), and you can get bored with WoW (and I have), then you should be able to understand where Cliff Stoll was coming from.

He was, apparently, the first person to get bored on the internet.

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[OrangeCatholic]

The snide comment that leapt out to me was "There's no way to safely send money over the internet."

Really...because the banks weren't the *first* people to get networked back in the 80's.

Other than that, fine article really.

Re:Wow, he really missed the opportunity

[OrangeCatholic]

>Perhaps only cynics could have foreseen the success of the internet?

Oh yes. Yes indeed. Texting is a bigger vice for young women than cocaine.

There's nothing quite as humiliating as spending a whole hour trying to craft the perfect 5-word text message just to get your dick properly wetted.

Funny thing is, I remember about four years ago they used to call. Is texting that new?

Sales

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFA

"So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?"

Today, my local mall in St. Louis couldn't outsell a 24-Hr period on the internet in a year.

Re:Sales

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't suppose your talking about Crestwood Plaza or whatever it's called now?

DUPE!

[BeardedChimp]

I swore I read about this 15 years ago. Slashdots getting worse.

Internet search has come a long way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question,

Heh. Lets cut and past "date of the Battle of Trafalgar" into the location bar of Chrome here...

and instantly...

"Battle of Trafalgar — Date: 21 October 1805
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Trafalgar"

Proving that internet search made the internet useful. The article's author had a stunning failure of vision.

Re:Internet search has come a long way.

[Hatta]

Sometimes I miss the old days of internet search. Sure, you had to hunt through half a dozen pages of results to find the information you were looking for. But half the fun is in the search. The other half is ending up in places you never would have thought to go on your own. These days you can find what you're looking for in a few clicks. Somehow that makes the internet feel smaller.

Re:Internet search has come a long way.

[Red Flayer]

These days you can find what you're looking for in a few clicks. Somehow that makes the internet feel smaller.

I think you've hit upon the true purpose of wikipedia.

Nostalgic inefficient search.

Next time you need to find something online, try to find it using only wikipedia -- it works best if you limit yourself to a single one-word search and force yourself to then follow links manually :)

Re:Internet search has come a long way.

[steelfood]

Proving that internet search made the internet useful.

Google made the internet useful.

Re:Internet search has come a long way.

[WWWWolf]

Heh. Lets cut and past "date of the Battle of Trafalgar" into the location bar of Chrome here...

and instantly...

"Battle of Trafalgar — Date: 21 October 1805 According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Trafalgar"

Proving that internet search made the internet useful. The article's author had a stunning failure of vision.

Search? Search and content. We've had working search, but it has only been in the recent years when people started demanding some sort of reliability out of all of this stuff that's posted on web. And it was haphazard and not very well collected and people didn't try to work together. In short, we didn't have Wikipedia in 1995. Encyclopedia makers were busy figuring out this "CD-ROM" thing and wishing that Microsoft wouldn't ruin this market by providing Encarta to customers without charging an arm and leg (as if people would actually buy cheap products, the bastards). Your most reliable free source on all things Battle of Trafalgar? Uncle Armchairgeneralsson's Battle Page (in danger of being evicted from geocities.com due to not having enough animated GIFs). Other reliable sources? Probably behind a pay wall of some sort.

Re:Internet search has come a long way.

[jmac_the_man]

Sure, you find a page with the Battle of Trafalgar on Wikipedia, but then you click on a link on that page, and then another one, and then BOOM! It's two hours later and you're reading about the United States Football League while your report on the battle goes unwritten.

Re:Internet search has come a long way.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why they invented Bing.

Re:Internet search has come a long way.

[OrangeCatholic]

>The article's author had a stunning failure of vision.

Do you realize the monumental volume of blood, sweat, and tears that went into making Wikipedia? It's 1% technology, 99% human effort.

I don't think it was easy to imagine that hundreds of thousands of people would just suddenly start writing everything down. Not to mention, db-backed sites were so rare in '95 that Cliff Stoll may have never seen one.

Re:Internet search has come a long way.

[RockWolf]

Sometimes I miss the old days of internet search. Sure, you had to hunt through half a dozen pages of results to find the information you were looking for. But half the fun is in the search. The other half is ending up in places you never would have thought to go on your own. These days you can find what you're looking for in a few clicks. Somehow that makes the internet feel smaller.

Sometimes I miss the old days of horse and carriage. Sure, you had to travel for half a dozen days to get to your family for christmas. But half the fun is in the travelling. The other half is ending up in places you never would have thought to go on your own. These days you can travel the planet in half a day. Somehow that makes the world feel smaller.

Contrary to the way that might look, this isn't a FTFY post. It's more a commentary on how the old ways of doing things seem to be romanticised - I remember diskless 16 colour terminals and a RISC server backing them up in primary school, I remember dogpile and altavista over dial-up a few years later (back when they were comparitively useful) - and that's the way it was, and better than what came before. What we have now is impressive, but in 10-15 years it will be outdated, cute, people will comment "How did we ever get by without $foo back then?" and kids will be saying "how did you ever find things without video search and live mm-resolution sat feeds for navigation?". I agree with your point - the internet seems smaller, even though there's exponentially more information on it than before (admittedly, most of it is garbage). As you seem to be implying, we're used to finding the information we need, everyone on /. is a jaded netizen where nothing is surprising, and the magic of finding somewhere new seems to have disappeared due to the google revolution. As a signature around here somewhere says, "The revolution will not be televised".

The frightening part is that I'm only 25. My lawn - it'll be growing here soon, 7-digit UID's might want to think about getting off it.

./Rockwolf

I predict my own doom !!!

[Foske]

Read my lips, in fifteen years I'll be as famous and important as this internet thingie !

I knew this.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are all figments of my imagination.

Now I imagine you all naked.

If you feel a tingling sensation, don't be concerned...

To be fair...

[Jiro]

To be fair, if you actually read the original article he mentions books and newspapers right after talking about books on disk--in context he's obviously referring to ebooks and not ordering a book and having it physically delivered (which would be nonsense for newspapers anyway). Paying for electronic books and newspapers is better than in 1995, but it hasn't exactly taken over, and newspapers are more outcompeted by free sites than by anything you buy.

Re:To be fair...

[wagnerrp]

Didn't the WSJ, or one of the other business rags have a service in the 90's where your computer would automatically dial into their servers early in the morning, and have a copy of the paper in your printer by the time you woke up?

What makes it really ironic

[MikeRT]

As I said on my blog****, the irony was that within 1 year of his article JavaScript was released in Netscape Navigator 2.0 and Brin and Page began Google. The former played a key role in enabling a lot of the usefulness in the web and the latter played a key role in organizing it effectively from the viewpoint of the public, especially to the extent that his point about how hard it was to find useful data was negated by Google.

I have to agree with Newsweek's writer who criticized him by saying that his problem wasn't in stating what the problems were, but his blithe assumption that they would never be overcome. That, right there, was the fatal flaw as it assumed that the computer industry was not invested in the Internet's future. That's almost like assuming that the established auto companies have no interest in the electric car market and would gladly let Tesla take it over unmolested.

****Just an ironic dig since he figured that blogging would never become mainstream, let alone that some bloggers (myself excluded) would become powerful players in the media.

Re:What makes it really ironic

[trash eighty]

A few months after this article being published i was in my first job... creating an online store selling stuff over the internet. I believe Amazon was just getting started then too. They have done quite well for themselves...

Things did change very quickly though, Netscape 2.0 was the game changer as you say.

Re:What makes it really ironic

[Hurricane78]

No, what makes it really ironic, is that one year later (1996), ICQ was released. The first social network. (Yes, it had all the functions to count as a real social network. I know because I had my first blind date because of it. [Turned out not so well though. ;])

Re:What makes it really ironic

[Culture20]

A year before this article, I was making online stores to sell stuff over the internet. Well, to place orders at least, the payment was still oldschool.

Re:What makes it really ironic

[dbcad7]

Actually, there were already search engines before Google came on the scene. It took a little bit for Google to take off, match, and surpass the others.. Web portals were the rage, and dedicated search boxes in the browser had not been thought of. What initially set Google apart, was it's speed more than it's results. They had a winning combination though.. speed, no ads, and good search results.. and deserved to win their place.. What is sad, is the state of web portals today.. very few are even worth considering, and even less that you can customize to your liking.

Re:What makes it really ironic

[tbuskey]

IRC predates ICQ by many years.

Going back further, some mainframes had chat room type apps.

I started using the conferencing on DTSS in 1980. I met lots of people and even dated one or two.
Dartmouth College provided accounts to all the Dartmouth community and even local high school students (which was how I got mine).
There were other colleges on the east coast that could connect into the conferencing as well.
I heard of a few people that met & married this way.

There was an explosion of use when Dartmouth brought in Macintoshes and dorm access in 1984+. There was a decline in the quality of chat (distracted users) when Multifinder started getting used (1990?) and people put chat in the background.

Re:What makes it really ironic

[OrangeCatholic]

Mmm, PageRank really made them take off. I remember with AltaVista, we got increasingly good at writing custom "advanced" searches. Once Google hit, we forgot all that.

How do we know it hasn't failed?

[hey!]

Maybe it has split into multiple bubble universes, and the people who are dealing with the consequences of the collapse of the Internet multiverse are simply beyond our cosmological horizon.

We are unaware that anything has gone wrong, because *our* universe continues to expand.

Re:How do we know it hasn't failed?

[Locke2005]

How do we know that you didn't die in childbirth in several of the multiverses, and thus the people in those universes were spared the discomfort of having to read that silly post?

Re:How do we know it hasn't failed?

[Hurricane78]

Well, depends if you look at it from the 4chan realm. ;)

It's from Clifford Stoll

[Wee]

I mean, seriously: This is the guy who wrote an entire book about how e-commerce was "baloney" and who now makes a living selling things on the Net. He thought the Internet would kill libraries and make schools close. He claimed that "information, better communications, and electronic programs" could never "cure social problems" (tell Obama that).

What else would you expect from him?

-B

Re:It's from Clifford Stoll

[interval1066]

"This is the guy who wrote an entire book about how e-commerce was "baloney" and who now makes a living selling things on the Net."

I'm a little surprised. Stoll is best known to me as the author of "Cuckoo's Egg", I think his first book, about his take-down of an early hacker (a kid in Eastern Europe who used a simple mail exploit to pwn a couple of Stoll's UC Berkley IT lab machines, if I remember correctly.)
First, I'm a bit surprised a hacker-catcher would take a luddite view of the future of the Internet, and second; I find it interesting as well that he would trash eCommerce. For such an interesting-sounding person he appears to utterly lack any real vision.

Re:It's from Clifford Stoll

[Anonymous Coward]

He's not exactly a Luddite. He just values direct human interaction a lot and feels the interspazz detracts from that. This attitude is just as prevalent in "Cuckoo's Egg" as in "Silicon Snake Oil" and, my favourite, "High Tech Heretic".

Re:It's from Clifford Stoll

[jedidiah]

Simply use the inherent efficiencies that the internet allows for to engage in the distraction of your choice.

If that happens to be "direct human interaction", then that has benefited from the evil dehumanizing internet.

Re:It's from Clifford Stoll

[trb]

I'm a bit surprised a hacker-catcher would take a luddite view...

If you read his book, you might remember that he logged the "hacker's" activities by copying them to printers and displays rather than to another computer's disk files. (You can see this by going to Google Books, then searching for Cuckoo's Egg, then searching for printer. See page 24 or so.) So he might have been a hacker-catcher and a luddite too. Or, as we call them now, steampunks.

Re:It's from Clifford Stoll

[glwtta]

He claimed that "information, better communications, and electronic programs" could never "cure social problems" (tell Obama that).

Are there many examples of social problems that have been cured by "information, better communications, and electronic programs"?

(I'm not sure what Obama has to do with anything)

Re:It's from Clifford Stoll

[interval1066]

I DID read the book. Do you remember how long ago it was published? Christ.

Re:It's from Clifford Stoll

[trb]

I DID read the book. Do you remember how long ago it was published? Christ.

I read the book when it was published in 1989. The events took place in 1986. By 1989, I had been a UNIX hacker for over 10 years. It's not like computers were a brand new technology then. Note that the ARPANET TCP/IP flag day was in 1983. Remember, Stoll's hacker was breaking into LBL from Germany. It may seem like ancient history to you, but ethernet, rs232 links, and hard disks were already well-established technologies.

-Christ

Re:It's from Clifford Stoll

[Wee]

I'd say that the world is a much smaller place now that we have fast global communications. Huge numbers of people being exposed to different cultures can't be a bad thing.

As for Obama, I was alluding to things like the grass-roots efforts and his being the candidate who embraced technology most fully that are at least partially credited with him being elected.

-B

Re:It's from Clifford Stoll

[Anonymous Coward]

Smaller is frequently considered not better.

Re:It's from Clifford Stoll

[glwtta]

Huge numbers of people being exposed to different cultures can't be a bad thing.

Never said it was, but not being a bad thing is a far cry from actually solving an existing problem. I would also say you are overestimating the extent to which people are actually exposed to different cultures - online communities tend to be pretty homogeneous.

As for Obama, I was alluding to things like the grass-roots efforts and his being the candidate who embraced technology most fully that are at least partially credited with him being elected.

Oh sure, a specific candidate used these tools to get elected, but that's really neither here nor there when talking about technological solutions to social problems.

Re:It's from Clifford Stoll

[OrangeCatholic]

>online communities tend to be pretty homogeneous.

Yep. On a forum like this, you can be pretty sure that 99% of us are from the US, and probably 75% of us are from the north, 90% are white, 100% are male.

The only really surprising thing is the wide spectrum of ages and jobs.

Are there any women here? Besides Natalie Portman and Esther Sassaman, that is.

Re:It's from Clifford Stoll

[interval1066]

"...UNIX hacker for over 10 years. It's not like computers were a brand new technology then."

You sound like a clone of me. Your point is...?"

Re:It's from Clifford Stoll

[trb]

Sorry to beat the dead horse, but when I said in my first comment, "if you read the book," I wasn't addressing you singularly, I was addressing readers in general, who had not read the book. And I stand by my comment that I thought Stoll was goofy to be using printers and displays as loggers. Even in the 1980's, this was pretty odd.

Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Back in 1995, I was just finishing up a Journalism degree at a Big Ten university, and in more than one media class, the subject of the internet (and its future) came up. But it was the students that brought it up...not the professors or the teaching assistants.

Unfortunately, the subject was always dismissed as some kind of fad. In fact, in one class, the assistant refused to even discuss the subject at all, almost as if he was annoyed by it. So, I'm not surprised at all that some in the mainstream media have been slow to really comprehend the subject, let alone adapt their business models.

Right idea wrong approach

[OldSoldier]

I read his response...

At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.

Sounds like a perfectly fine thing to caution people about. Problem is he then goes on to say these THINGS won't happen when in fact they DID happen but they still didn't solve our problems.

Re:Right idea wrong approach

[Anonymous Coward]

I read his response...

At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.

Sounds like a perfectly fine thing to caution people about. Problem is he then goes on to say these THINGS won't happen when in fact they DID happen but they still didn't solve our problems.

Exactly, this part from the original (i.e. 1995) article illustrates both how he is both right and wrong:

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

He was wrong about the first and last things, but he's right that digital information is no replacement for a competent teacher. Although though a well made educational disc can certainly enhance the effectiveness of a competent teacher. Thus he's wrong in almost all the specific applications he mentions, but still right that in predicting it won't be a panacea for humanity's more important issues and problems.

Re:Right idea wrong approach

[OrangeCatholic]

I thought it was interesting that he said, "You probably don't remember a single educational film."

Actually, I remember all of the real films they showed us. I certainly don't remember most of the chalkboard discussions we had about anything.

The cartoon show "Home Movies" has suggested that all classroom instruction be done via film.

Cliff Stoll in 1995ish

[fatboy]

In 1995 or 1996 Cliff was the keynote speaker at the Dayton Hamvention. He really got those old men fired up and hating on the Internet. He was promoting a book named "Silicon Snake Oil", IIRC. It was quite humorous for the next two or three years to watch the reaction of some of those guys asking about manuals for stuff I was selling in the Dayton boneyard. I would direct them to check in the Internet, and they would loose all manner of sensibility. Too funny.

Re:Cliff Stoll in 1995ish

[shentino]

Thus saith Cliff's Keynotes

Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM

[WebmasterNeal]

-Bill Gates

Re:Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

It was 64k and that visionary Steve Jobs who said it.

Re:Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM

[Locke2005]

That quote might be apocryphal, but his quote "The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." on page 265 of the first edition of The Road Ahead is well established fact. (I have the book.)

Re:Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM

[GasparGMSwordsman]

Except he most likely never said such a thing.

When IBM introduced its PC in 1981, many people attacked Microsoft for its
role. These critics said that 8-bit computers, which had 64K of address space,
would last forever. They said we were wastefully throwing out great 8-bit
programming by moving the world toward 16-bit computers.

We at Microsoft disagreed. We knew that even 16-bit computers, which had 640K
of available address space, would be adequate for only four or five years. (The
IBM PC had 1 megabyte of logical address space. But 384K of this was assigned
to special purposes, leaving 640K of memory available. That's where the
now-infamous ``640K barrier'' came from.)

-Bill Gates

Source Bloomberg Business News circa '96.

Snopes also has some useful info:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#Misattributed

Much like the virility of your comment, my CAPTCHA was "limpness"...

To err is human...

[drewhk]

You should read the end of TFA:

"At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.

[...]

And, as I’ve laughed at others’ foibles, I think back to some of my own cringeworthy contributions.

Now, whenever I think I know what’s happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff

Warm cheers to all,

—Cliff Stoll on a rainy Friday afternoon in Oakland"

Re:my piss is the frostiest

[Anonymous Coward]

Get on my horse, my horse is amazing!

one thing right anyway

[jfruhlinger]

...predicts that we'll soon buy ... newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

Well, it's true that nobody's buying newspapers over the Internet. Isn't that one of the newspapers' biggest problems?

Re:one thing right anyway

[OrangeCatholic]

The problem with buying a newspaper over the internet is that it comes with the news, but not the paper.

That's like buying a "bag of chips" with no bag.

Tomorrow's World

[Anonymous Coward]

I predict that within 100 years, computers will be twice as powerful, 10,000 times larger, and so expensive that only the five richest kings of Europe will own them.

Stoll?

[Sperbels]

Clifford Stoll? Seriously? That guy has never been much of an authority on computers. He was just a guy who capitalized on the little bit of street credit he got from bringing down the hacker Markus Hess. Stoll's opinions were never worth much.

Your sig

[Locke2005]

Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. That might be true, but googling that phrase will produce exactly the results you would expect.

Re:Your sig

[Anonymous Coward]

No it didn't :(

Re:Your sig

[Locke2005]

Have you tried turning "SafeSearch filtering" off first?

Note

[ucblockhead]

I am old enough to remember reading this article back in 1995. His view was uncommon back then, though shared by a lot of anti-Internet curmudgeons. His article was a reaction to all the people touting the Internet as something that would swallow up all commerce.

Risks of contrarianism

[SiliconEntity]

According to the article, Stoll's excuse is that he was trying to play the contrarian:

At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.

Contrarianism helps sell magazines (and garners pageviews) but let us not forget that it is usually WRONG. Yes, humbling as it may be to admit, the great unwashed masses, the "sheeple", are usually right in their collective opinions. Contrarians often escape punishment for their folly because no one cares, but in this case Stoll got properly burned.

Re:Risks of contrarianism

[LateArthurDent]

According to the article, Stoll's excuse is that he was trying to play the contrarian:

At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.

Contrarianism helps sell magazines (and garners pageviews) but let us not forget that it is usually WRONG. Yes, humbling as it may be to admit, the great unwashed masses, the "sheeple", are usually right in their collective opinions. Contrarians often escape punishment for their folly because no one cares, but in this case Stoll got properly burned.

Heh...these apology for bad predictions articles are always funny as hell, so do you know why you don't see more of them, even though "contrarianism helps sell magazines"? It's because the contrarians are usually right and then you don't have the apology article years later, it's just business as usual.

The unwashed masses suck at predicting the future. Think about the future predictions of the 50's and 60's and wonder why you don't have a flying car, a robot maid, and why even though computers have made the total amount of labor output greater, we don't have a 4-hour workday. However, the world is marvelously different than what it used to be, just in a completely different way than they predicted.

Re:Risks of contrarianism

[steelfood]

even though computers have made the total amount of labor output greater, we don't have a 4-hour workday.

Judging from the amount of people on Slashdot in the middle of the day, I would say that you are wrong.

Re:Risks of contrarianism

[LateArthurDent]

even though computers have made the total amount of labor output greater, we don't have a 4-hour workday.

Judging from the amount of people on Slashdot in the middle of the day, I would say that you are wrong.

Oh, we're all working hard. We just check slashdot while compiling

Re:Risks of contrarianism

[OrangeCatholic]

>even though computers have made the total amount of labor output greater, we don't have a 4-hour workday

Because people keep pushing out babies? We're certainly not *breeding* like we have robots to do our work for us.

My town has 600 kids in its graduating class and like 1 strip mall for them to work in.

"This invention X will fix the school system"

[peter303]

The flip side of the coin is that every new media since Edison's phonograph (and probably before) has been touted as fixing the broken education system. yet for the most part, they dont.

Reminds me of the NYT

[damburger]

In 1920 they published an incredibly snotty editorial ripping on Robert Goddard, arrogantly stating scientific errors (such as that a rocket could not work in a vacuum as it lacked something to 'push against'), and generally claiming that even a high school student could see that this Goddard fellow was a crazy loon.

They published a 'correction' of the editorial on July 17th, 1969.

But he's actually been to the future!!!

[yamamushi]

It's easy to see how one would make this mistake, when they've actually been to the future : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GNGJkkkagGw

Cliff Stoll?

[smd75]

For someone with worthy experience to talk about the internet, Im quite surprised he wrote A) That article from 1995 and B) Silicon Snake Oil. His book The Cuckoo's Egg was excellent. I felt he had a firm grasp as to where the internet could go. I admired the guy for his work. I guess all those Berkeley kids aren't on top of their game. The guy _was_ an astronomer after all.

Re:Cliff Stoll?

[TheNarrator]

Maybe he was secretly trying to downplay the Internet to keep the powers that be from seeing the internet as a threat and thus letting it grown and develop without interference?

When you are weak, appear strong. When strong, appear weak. You know...

Re:Cliff Stoll?

[smd75]

Quote from Liberty Journal on Amazon re: Silicon Snake Oil

"Stoll, a Berkeley astronomer who chronicled how he broke a computer spy ring in The Cuckoo's Egg (LJ 9/15/89) and who has been netsurfing for 15 years, does an apparent about-face here, warning that the technophiles are trying to sell us a bill of goods on the promise of the Internet"

I dont think this was a tactic to help the internet develop

Things Change at a Rapid Rate

[Sagelinka]

I remember the "internet" around that time. Windows 3.1 and AOL were the big shots. 14.4kbps modems and computers that had only 386MHZ. Good times. But only a narrow minded person would believe that the internet, or computers for that matter, would fail. All technology updates at a very rapid rate. From Tapes to Compact Discs to Flash Media.

Re:Things Change at a Rapid Rate

[rubycodez]

and since it existed when they were born, my children will think there was always an internet and that it was always big, and that people always had a computer or four in their homes.

Re:Things Change at a Rapid Rate

[MichaelJE2]

My god that is scary, I'm 19 and I still remember the internet take-off (to an extent)
By then Google will own me and my family though, so I guess I should accept that now.

so we could say

[rubycodez]

He neglected to see the Eighteen Wheelers cruising down the Information Superhighway that would make roadkill of his article, and didn't realize that If You Build It They Will Come.

This is a nice example

[al0ha]

A nice example of why reporters should stick to reporting and quit with the constant conjecture and personal opinion. Too much personal opinion, paid opinion and otherwise influenced opinion and conjecture fill what passes for "News" these days. A reporter's only job is to report the facts, but somehow that lesson, learned in journalism 101, does not make it out of academia anymore.

Re:This is a nice example

[jbengt]

Except that the author wasn't a reporter.
Also, igonring the absolute way he presented his points as predictions, he actually pointed out some valid issues.

Re:This is a nice example

[al0ha]

Egad you are correct, how terribly short-sighted and embarrassing for him as a scientist. My point about too much opinion in the press stands.

The internet didn't fail as predicted...

[Hatta]

It failed in ways no one predicted.

Re:The internet didn't fail as predicted...

[0xdeadbeef]

Bingo. I predict that in ten years we're going to feel the same way about "Web 2.0" as we do about 1970's fashion. And Facebook will have gone the way of AOL.

Re:The internet didn't fail as predicted...

[Anonymous Coward]

So now it's in ten years?

I ask because people started making that same prediction started five years ago, and at first it was going to happen in a year or less. Soon that year had passed, and the predictions were still coming. Fast forward a couple more years (and a couple more non-deaths) and suddenly it was "only" two years until this silly Web 2.0 thing would surely perish. Another couple of years and it still hasn't happened.

You sure you're not jumping the gun by going straight to ten years? Five seems like the next logical step for backpedallers who can't grasp the concept that a silly name doesn't magically doom concepts that have proven themselves viable.

Re:The internet didn't fail as predicted...

[0xdeadbeef]

I don't consider the concepts non-viable, I consider the implementation non-viable. HTML + Javascript is the shiniest turd ever polished. You think HTML 5 will save you, but it will be your undoing. You will use it to kill Flash and then try to turn every website into a retarded Flash applet. You'll keep tripping over yourselves with the increasing complexity, burning money like you have the last five years, while native platforms adopt the "cloud" and the "app store", giving them the qualities which were the only reason web applications were ever compelling in the first place.

Stoll versus Lanier

[David Gerard]

It's instructive to look at the differences in what Clifford Stoll says versus what someone like Jaron Lanier says.

Clifford Stoll reminds us that technology is not a panacea, and to stay human.

Jaron Lanier is upset by "numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals" - you know, that the peasants were let onto the ARPAnet. His main gripe with the Internet is that he doesn't get the attention any more.

Re:Stoll versus Lanier

[mschuyler]

Lanier was 100% tongue in cheek in that article--really.

Re:Stoll versus Lanier

[David Gerard]

What, you mean the one I linked and wrote?

Re:Stoll versus Lanier

[spun]

Thanks for the laugh. That wasn't Lanier. Jaron takes himself so seriously that he would never write anything tongue in cheek about himself. He's an elitist poseur

I've never understoof Stoll's about face

[mschuyler]

he got his 15 minutes of fame from Cuckoo's Egg, the book AND the movie. He's a PhD astonomer who was in the right place at the right time. I've heard him speak. He's witty, funny, and energetic, a delight to hear, really. I've never understood why he turned on the Net. He was, after all, on the bleeding edge for a time, and seemed poised to take off on a career of internet promotion rather than demotion. Strange.

Re:I've never understoof Stoll's about face

[Obfuscant]

I've never understood why he turned on the Net. He was, after all, on the bleeding edge for a time, and seemed poised to take off on a career of internet promotion rather than demotion. Strange.

Because at the time, the "bleeding edge" was not "the web", it was the Internet.

It's hard to remember back when "the web" didn't exist, but today "the web" is all that people think of. Today, when you say "internet", people expect your next words to be "double-u double-u double-u". Try saying "FTP" or "UUCP" and watch their eyes glaze over.

At the time Stoll was "bleeding edge", we hadn't run across the eternal September of AOL. AOL was, at best, their own message boards, much like Compuserve. We're talking about a time before dejaNews, when BITNET ran FTP-by-mail servers, when you needed a valid reason to have an Internet connection to start with. You didn't call your local ISP or cable company to get on the Internet, you called PSI or Network Solutions or someone else and rented a T1 ... and if you hacked your way onto the net it was through someone's 300 baud HayesStack connected to a serial port somewhere.

Except for having his computer using a Federal Screw Works Votrax unit reading the data as it passed by, the kid in War Games was doing exactly what most of us were doing for fun in those days of "the Internet". (I didn't own my own Votrax until I bought it at a PBS auction for $30 -- nobody else apparently knew what it was or what it was worth at the time.)

And "bleeding edge computer science" at the time was hooking a Votrax up to a phone line and modem and having it call the local pizza place to order pizza. It was billed as the perfect helpmate to the mute person.

Re:I've never understoof Stoll's about face

[topham]

He turned on the Internet because he felt it turned on him.

Repeating his adventure ad-nausium, touring the country, etc all contributed to his deteriorating personal life.
During that time he changed as a personal and blamed the Internet and computers for his problems.

In truth he no longer lived the filtered, protected life he dreamt that he had and his friends/family still thought they lived in.

Opening your eyes and seeing the world for what it is, when everyone around you sees it through rose coloured glasses, or as simply black-and-white; good-vs-evil has a tendency to destroy people.

Re:I've never understoof Stoll's about face

[Anonymous Coward]

There was no about-face. The Cuckoo's Egg is a great book because of its human elements: Berkeley hippie lectures CIA on security; jumping out of shower when pager signals hacker is online, only to be caught by housemate, wet and naked in front of computer; burning only pair of shoes in microwave, trying to dry them out before company arrives. Anyone who can write so well about those things must love real life experiences more than he loves the Net.

Re:I've never understoof Stoll's about face

[Eric_Scheirer]

I'm not sure what 1995 you're thinking about, but I was buying books from Amazon.com in 1995. I have a single account with a continuous order history all the way back.

Re:I've never understoof Stoll's about face

[OrangeCatholic]

Go back a couple more years and it's accurate. In 1992 I had a 2400 baud, and when my friend showed me "the internet," I said "No thanks, I'll stick with BBSes. At least they have color and games."

Of course by 1993 things were quite different already. Mosaic had arrived, and Gopher predicted the invention of search engines.

But unless you were in college, or had a computer job, you probably didn't have access to see these things happening.

1995 is a joke...that's the Netscape IPO. At that point, every high school in America was in the process of getting online, if they weren't already.

That's just another nail in the coffin

[MikeRT]

I think JavaScript and Google, however, count as the foundation for the actual coffin itself because they were critical to making it so genuinely useful in ways that allowed for a lot of what he dismissed. JavaScript really enabled all of the applications he said wouldn't exist and Google enabled us to easily find them.

Re:my piss is the frostiest

[Anonymous Coward]

But does it have "Drinkability"?

Newsweek is trash.

[pigwiggle]

Had a subscription for a year. I quit reading after just a few issues. The news is stale, which is fine for a weekly periodical. But the analysis was terrible. Shallow, biased, often misinformed. Not surprised they missed this. Just one among a titanic pile of crap.

Re:Newsweek is trash.

[OrangeCatholic]

I was surprised actually, Newsweek is rather thick and mostly liberal. Maybe it depends on how bent you are. I turned down Time in high school (far too easy), but had no problem reading Time recently...I guess I've mellowed.

The only thing that sucks about Newsweek is the occasional terrorist rant by Fareed Zakaria (a "liberal" half-breed) and a couple of conservative windbags they keep on staff.

It is an infrastructure necessity

[elnyka]

I think the quote that gets me is: " It's an interesting look back at a time when the Internet was still a novelty and not yet a necessity."

Don't get me wrong, I tend to go into withdrawls if my connections go down for an extended period of time, but, the internet being a necessity? I dunno. There are plenty of people out there that live and breathe and make money with no connection or need to the internet whatsoever. I don't think it is truly a necessity like shelter and food.

While *I* would not want to live without it, people still can pretty easily these days.

Something does not need to be a vital necessity (like shelter and food) for it to be a necessity. We could take its counter-argument to the limit and argue then that electricity is not a necessity.

We have to look at necessities from the point of view of the infrastructure and dependencies (social, economical) that they create (or are the base for their day-to-day operations.) When a commodity reaches a point of usage such that a lack of it would cause great inconvenience or financial loss, then it becomes a necessity.

For example, a large number of people are now using the internet for Job searching and continuing education. This is specially true for IT-related folks that out of work (or for many folks that are unemployed if we reasonably generalize the truth of the situation.) A large section of grad students (specially working grad students) depend on the internet for course delivery. Any disruption to that service will cause in severe consequences. Loss of class time, or even loss of course for the later examples (losses with a clear financial impact). For the former, it could result in a drastic deterioration of one's already precarious financial situation.

Entire industries (for good or bad) utilize the internet for work and collaboration. Our ability to solve edge-case problems in a fast fashion is in large part proportional to having access to google and the like. We have an entire infrastructure of commerce that people depend on in their daily lives.

The internet then is now a financial and infrastructure necessity, just like public transportation systems, public infrastructure and banking are. None of these are vital necessities like food or shelter, but they still remain necessities of a different magnitude. So is the internet now.

The difference between pundits and people

[Anonymous Coward]

The pundit that wrote this very lame story, Bill Gates and my father (an IRS mainframe programmer) all have one thing in common, they believe they have an ability to review, sort and analyze data that the average person does not have and as a result believe that data should be limited or filtered for most people making analysis much easier. If we only tell them what is relevant (what we want them to know) they can "analyze" (come to the conclusion we want them to) much more efficiently. The reason the internet succeeded was because of the expansiveness and availability of the data. Anyone can find out anything as long as we keep the censors hiding in their dark little holes. Open minded people discuss opposing viewpoints anywhere and everywhere on any and all topics, learning and growing faster than anyone could have predicted because the information can be found that is not filtered by a church or a government or a corporation or a censor or a propagandist.

You don't remember very well

[spun]

How old were you in 1995, if you don't mind my asking?

You don't need to use the quotes, it really was the same Internet. Windows 95 came out in... 1995. In 1995, I was using Linux at home, and Novell Netware at work. Yes, AOL was still around. Yes, there were still 14.4k modems and 80386 processors. They didn't run at 386MHZ. The most common modems ran at 28.8Kbps and 33.6Kbps. The most common microprocessor was the 80486.

Yes, this guy was wrong about the Internet, but so were the many more commentators who took the opposite view, that the Internet would fundamentally change all aspects of human society and behavior.

navel-gazing

[Kadoo]

I do a lot of navel-gazing on the internet!

Tag: "navalgazing?"

[Valdrax]

I'm not sure what sailors would be looking at things has to do with the article.

He did get some things right.

[plopez]

*"What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data."*

That hasn't changed.

*"What's missing from this electronic wonderland? Human contact."*
Still no real change. Despite social networking sites. It just isn't the same.

His point about teachers is still true. Technology is secondary to good teachers.

I love this quote:
*"But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community."*

The interweb is still trendy and oversold.

So, somethings have not changed. Not at the core anyway.

You know whose prediction is coming true?

[0xdeadbeef]

This one.

Re:You know whose prediction is coming true?

[Culture20]

This one: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html

I wish I hadn't already commented on this topic (and with such a trivial comment too). I have mod points but can't mod this up.

Good Read

[OrangeMonkey11]

This is a good reflecting article; oh the things we say when we're ignorant and afraid of change.

It's like when Sliced Bread came out; people were skeptical and afraid and wanted their hands hold with a soft spoken voice saying "it's ok change is good it will make your life better"

If only the MSM would go back and ...

[quax]

... examine the other 99% of cases where they were wrong:

1) Selling the Iraq war
2) Cheering on the first bubble (.com)
3) Then the second (real estate)
4) At the same time treating every utterance from Alan Greenspan like a missive from god

The list goes on and on. I for once can hardly wait until the economic pressure from the Internet puts them out of their misery.

He isnt alone.

[nurb432]

A lot of us never thought the 'internet' would even be heard of outside the hardcore geek community.

Lesson learned: never say never.

15 years later

[Cliff Stoll]

I agree with many of the Slashdot posters who've commented on my article of 15 years ago. There's a great deal to munch on - plenty of hilarious mistakes as well as several ideas still worth thinking about.

That 1995 article grew from my questioning attitude. When I hear nearly unanimous commentary without any critical dialog, I become skeptical. Perhaps too skeptical, as that article shows.

At the time, I saw my role as encouraging questions about then-common predictions. As a way of introducing dialog through debate, if not deliberation.

Clearly, I'm no futurist, able to extrapolate across decades. If anyone, I suspect that school teachers are the most in touch with future generations.

Now? Oh, I try to stay away from predictions; two teenagers gleefully keep me informed of my daily mistakes. I teach physics, speak at meetings, and write the occasional article for Scientific American. I make Klein Bottles ... and, yes, I sell them online, in obvious contradiction to that 1995 article.

Best wishes to all,
-Cliff (in Oakland California, on a Monday afternoon without sunspots)

Re:15 years later

[OrangeCatholic]

Yes!!!! I just spent 2 hours reading this thread and then I find this.

Your article wasn't wrong, bro. As usual, people mistook editorial tone for substance. It's like yelling at someone, "YOU'RE A GREAT PERSON," and they cry and say, "Why did you yell at meeee..."

I remember when people worried about "brick and mortar" going away. Meanwhile, the most recent addition to the mall is a giant fucking bookstore.

And the internet does suck for social interaction. Unfortunately everybody else got online. Now we're the heroes. Imagine that.

Re:15 years later

[RobertB-DC]

You're the Klein Bottle Guy? That's got to be the best tongue-in-cheek site selling an actual product, in the history of ever.

Not surprisingly, you were too modest to plug your site, so I'll do it for you: Acme Klein Bottle.

Sample awesomeness, from the Conditions of Acme's Unconditional Guarantee:

We at Acme Klein Bottle strive to create the finest nonorientable surfaces and hope that you will be satisfied with your new Acme manifold. For this reason, we are pleased to offer this UNCONDITIONAL GUARANTEE complete with these conditions:

* We unconditionally guarantee your Acme Klein Bottle to be free of any defects in workmanship or workwomanship for a period of ONE YEAR following purchase. If you aren't satisfied with your Acme Klein Bottle -- for any reason -- just return it for a refund or replacement. You pick up shipping charges.

* We guarantee safe arrival. If your Klein Bottle arrives broken, call or send email and we will immediately send a replacement.

* We slightly guarantee your Klein Bottle for THREE MONTHS against any cracks or breakage, whether due to earthquakes, clumsy undergrads, or greasy fingers. Just mail us a fragment and $10, and we will send a replacement.

* We warrant each Acme Klein Bottle for a period of FIVE YEARS to be absolutely free of any magnetic monopoles. If you discover one, contact us immediately and we will refund your purchase price right after claiming the Nobel Prize.

* Furthermore, we guarantee for TEN YEARS that any polyhedron spanning your unbroken Acme Klein Bottle will have about as many edges as the sum of its vertices plus faces.

* We further warrant for ONE MILLION YEARS that within a Euclidean plane, the square of a right triangle's hypotenuse will equal the sum of the squares of the two remaining legs.

In addition, Acme's provides this exclusive LIFETIME GUARANTEE: We guarantee that you will live your entire lifetime, or double your money back.

Clifford Stoll

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

the article was written by journalists with editors

Clifford Stoll was (is?) a hacker, a Physics PhD that was thought a computer expert by physicists and a physicist by computer experts. He wrote a book about his almost single-handed fight against German crackers at the service of the Soviet bloc. And it is a good read, even with Unix commands. So whatever but a "journalist".

Nice to see you around

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

I remember reading "The Cuckoo's Egg" from the Uni library in the 1990s. I don't remember if I managed to read "Silicon Snake Oil" but I think I did. Funny that some weeks ago I was going to mention SSO in a discussion about computers at school and, when I google about it, I found Newsweek's article.

Good luck.

Memories

[pubwvj]

Bill Gates said, "Nobody will ever need more than 640K Bytes of memory" space. Ah, the gaffs of the rich, powerful and foolish.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Redundant much?

[TangoMargarine]

It's an interesting look back at a time when the Internet was still a novelty and not yet a necessity.

I'd be interested to see something that is both a novelty and a necessity.

Newsweek's Assertion "Not Even Wrong"

[rickshaf]

OK, at the time of that article, the Internet had already become much more than a novelty. Newsweek just didn't notice. And I'd have to agree that the Internet had NOT become a necessity. I'd even agree that, if the Internet isn't available to me for say, 48-hours, it's no biggie. I'd just have to deal with a bunch of emails that have been accumulating. However, if the Internet as a whole went down for an extended period of time, there would be hell to pay. Just look at the economic consequences to businesses in Egypt when that ship hit and cut an undersea cable carrying much of the Internet connectivity between there and Europe. It wasn't pretty for them....

Also libraries don't have card catalogues anymore,

[Anonymous Coward]

and that is a right pain in the arse.

'Silicon Snake Oil'

[dugeen]

This story reminded me of a grumpy book 'Silicon Snake Oil' I once read, which advanced the same thesis. I was going to ask whether anyone had heard from author of that recently, till I found that he and Mr C. Stoll are one and the same person.

If you build it they probably won't come

[PeterWone]

"If you build it they will come" is bollocks. If you build it and they don't come, you will go broke and be forgotten. If you build it and by some bizarre chance it really floats their collective boat, then you will be wealthy and in a position to publish self-congratulatory and eminently quotable epithets such as "If you build it they will come." Darwinism is brutal. Any given frog has hundreds of thousands of offspring over the course of its life. You can tell that statistically only two of them survive to breed from the fact that we are not hip deep in frogs. So it is with business ideas and enterprises. Few of them survive. As with nature red in tooth and claw, survival is slightly dependent on fitness in context and heavily dependent on luck.

Re:If you build it they probably won't come

[rubycodez]

yup, usually it IS bullocks. But I has just stringing together four common early 90s phrases for nostalgia's sake.