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How the Internet Didn't Fail As Predicted

Posted by samzenpus on from the series-of-popular-tubes dept.

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."

3 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. Wish he was wrong about the salespeople by RobertB-DC · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
  2. Government crackdowns by Wowsers · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?

    --
    Take Nobody's Word For It.
  3. Internet search has come a long way. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.