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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."

1 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. 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.