"Nobody will ever buy books or airline tickets on the Internet." - Newsweek, 1995

Speaking of Gates, in the first edition of his book, The Road Ahead, published in the late 1995, there was not even a single mention of the internet!

_____
Bruce

There's a lot more that they got wrong than just
what's pointed out above.

I must say that I agree with 'no CD-ROM can take
the place of a competent teacher' and what they
say about IT replacing teachers. But being a
teacher I would say that wouldn't I. IT is a great
tool to help teachers, but cannot completely replace
them.

To defend the article it was written 15 years ago,
when accessing the Internet and what was on the
Intenet was much different than it is today.

Question: Is there anything now that we think will
never be done on the Internet? Are we right to think
that? What if it is possible, what can be done to
make it happen?

A friend and I had a mutual friend who had just
bought a new PC and he was telling us how he had
software on it that compressed his disk so that it
doubled it's capacity.

We laughed at him and told him that he would
never fill up his disk without the compression. We told
him to remove his compression software and speed
things up.

This was in the mid 90s and his disk was 1GB. So we thought you would never need more than 1GB.

Yes we were wrong, but at least not as wrong as Bill Gates (although he said his many years before us).

As someone had said around a 100 years back - everything that could have been invented have already been invented. Forgot who but it was someone high and mighty, and feeling too lazy to go and search.

internet is overrated, it's just a series of tubes

Amazing article! Funny!
Thanks for sharing!

So wrong on so many levels and yet.........right about one thing, the singularity of human interaction. Nothing is so warm and personal as a gathering of like minds - in person. Doing it via the internet is certainly possible, it's done all the time, yet it just isn't the same. And of course there is the social downside that on the internet people can and do say things that they would never have the guts to say face to face.

Ah, well, back to my Kindle.

Reading on a monitor, a person blinks 1/10th as much. That causes dry eye and changes the shape of the optic orb and hence focus. I am sure most have had to experience of too much time on-line and when you step away everything takes a bit to snap back in focus. That is due to the eye drying more than if you were reading on paper. Strange but true.

I have that book. Still haven't read it.

Funny thing is that, in the late 90's, I was trying in vain to convince people that the future of the Internet was local...

I read it twice as well. A very good read.

How could a man who lived that story think (and this is an inference) that only Russian spy masters could ever have the time to figure out how to move money on the internet? The article is foolish, fainthearted, and obviously false.

He's a presenter at TED by the way... nuff said about TED.

I'm reminded of the phrase - "Famous last words..."

we need to be careful here in the present about the past and not commit what I call temporal bigotry. Thinking of the past in today's terms. As Paul pointed out- who thought or doing things like ordering food from your computer 15 years ago?

For a real eye opener - take a look, not at the special effects in movies - but on the nightly news. In my youth our weather reports had very bad black and white images of part of the earth with hand drawn symbols. Before those they were just a board with maps on them and big symbols the weather droid moved around.

Take a look at the intros on even your local news today and if you can compare them with even images from the early 90's, or 80's.

Things change - technology allows us to do more.

Now lets discuss the really important topics of the day - like where the @#$ is my flying car dudes!!!!!!

--Jack

Paul,

Interesting notion. Does entertainment tend to be more accurate, because it applies imagination to human desires?

Something worth thinking about. Thank you, sir.


Paul

But in defence of peoples lack of insight 20+ years ago, things were very different. Since the proliferation of computers, things have changed drastically, not because of computers themselves but because of the way computers have changed virtually everything. Products and ideas that used to take 15 years of development, a spare warehouse or factory unit, hundreds of staff, tooling, R&D etc, costing millions is no longer how things are done.

New ideas and technology are now modelled by software, in a small office of few staff, technicians, a team leader and a deadline. The millions of dollars and years of research for products / new designs is now done at a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time and tooling / prototyping / testing is reduced drastically. Many new ideas now go straight from computer model to testing lab and then straight into production. This has changed everything and in fairness, was not an easy thing to predict. The advancements of technology have become almost self perpetuating.

Paul, you are more right than you even imagine. "The Matrix" is one movie that parallels things that the mass majority of the people's on the planet do not believe, let alone even know about......

The movie just changes the names and distorts things a bit, but its almost an exact reflection of many, many things that we are not allowed to talk about on the forum.

Michael, look up the history of the iPod - the developers at Apple attribute its development to an episode of STTNG where Data is listening to several musical items at once from the computer...

And a note to Paul Myers (one of few people I know who uses the terms grok, hacker and cracker in the correct form) - in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land I remember one of the characters having a strategy session with one of his aids on how best to get out his [electronic] writings and get them protected via copyrights etc and in those jurisdictions where such laws were not honored how best to get as much as possible out of them as fast as possible before the leaches got to it.

Which shows that SF predictions are not just limited to technologies - but social interactions as well. CyberPunk anyone?

--Jack

So, you're saying other folks are better at foresight? Care to predict what the net will look like, or what new things we'll be doing on the 'net in 15 years?

peace,
--Jack

"What is selected by the wife at her console will be paid for by the husband at his counterpart console"

She wishes!

It's interesting how many here can't look back at that article with any more accuracy than Stoll could predict the future. Hindsight should be easier than foresight, shouldn't it?

In the 70's (20 years before the article was printed) the university where I worked went "online" with a computer that filled a huge room. It was a massive machine and "we're online" was a big deal. It wasn't the internet but we were "connected".

There are some funny predictions in the article but some insightful comments, too.

On many topics, that is true - hype, misdirection, politics, so many areas are full of info but lacking in fact. No matter what you believe on almost any topic - you can find a blogger somewhere who agrees with you.

That was an insightful comment - the result was the avalanche of participation in social media. MySpace, Facebook, Twitter.

Ignoring the business aspect of Facebook and Twitter - these were designed to enable human interaction online. These sites provide a much wider range of "people contact" but at a shallow level of interaction. The "contact" void is filled online with legions of "friends" who are, in reality, strangers you have made contact with.

kay