Predicting the Internet in 1995 285
Rexdude writes "Here is a list of predictions from 'The Internet' magazine at the end of 1994. It highlights the major changes and events on the net as it was back then (20 million users only, for starters).
Seems a throwback to a relatively more innocent time, when the unwashed masses had not taken over the net as much as today. And look at the reverence accorded to long dead protocols like Gopher!"
interesting... (Score:4, Funny)
So back then the internet was a magazine, eh?
(magazine also happens to be my favorite book)
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I think I am gonna buy a truckload right now, to send to Ted.
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No, it's a series of 11 dimensional strings that are shaped like tubes!
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Yes it was a staple fold magazine, as were... (Score:4, Informative)
nice "best and worst" for net entertainment (Score:3, Insightful)
A few gems in there. (Score:5, Interesting)
Conflicts between local and global Internet jurisdictions will become more pronounced, especially over censorship issues. How will prosecutors in Tennessee go after posters from Denmark?
A very good question indeed. Pity he didn't pick prosecutors in New York going after posters from Russia... let's hope the question remains unanswered.
It was also interesting how many of the 'big questions' in 1994 are now forgotten. Like SLIP versus PPP -- now, most people couldn't even tell you what either of them are. It went from being a big question, to a decided fact, and then faded into irrelevance. Now there's just "the Internet," and most people don't think about how they connect to it with their modem, if they use a modem at all. I wonder if HD-DVD vs BluRay will look the same way, in 10 years of hindsight?
Re:A few gems in there. (Score:5, Informative)
That may be true, but PPP is still widely used (I don't know about SLIP). I use it when connecting to the Net through my mobile phone. Surfing the web over a GPRS link feels just like the old times.
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HD-DVD vs BluRay (Score:3, Interesting)
It was also interesting how many of the 'big questions' in 1994 are now forgotten. Like SLIP versus PPP -- now, most people couldn't even tell you what either of them are. It went from being a big question, to a decided fact, and then faded into irrelevance. Now there's just "the Internet," and most people don't think about how they connect to it with their modem, if they use a modem at all. I wonder if HD-DVD vs BluRay will look the same way, in 10 years of hindsight?
Considering also how VHS vs. Betamax looks today (I can't remember the last time I bought a VHS tape)... mainly over convenience (no rewinding, etc.) and quality/durability.
In probably less than 10 years video on demand plus larger capacity flash media will make HD-DVD vs. BluRay irrelevant... also mainly over convenience and quality/durability.
Convenience - no need to buy/store/insert/etc. a "big" physical disk, if you want to bring it to a friend's house load it on your ~50GB USB stick on your keychain,
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I do not believe that "lifetime" subscriptions will occur anytime soon. The MPAA/RIAA models are trying to move towards pay per play, or a
Missed a few. (Score:5, Insightful)
I dunno. Kenny Greenberg's comments seemed to hit pretty hard:
And as a reminder for those of you who got your hopes up in November of 2006 -- you might want to look at who was President in 1994. Hint: His last name wasn't "Bush".
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And they're right, too.
"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true."
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And as a reminder for those of you who got your hopes up in November of 2006 -- you might want to look at who was President in 1994. Hint: His last name wasn't "Bush".
Funny, there weren't presidential elections in 2006, so I don't know why you'd relate congressional elections back to Bush and Clinton. The congress has remained under the same leadership for those 12 years, however, and the vast majority of issues Slashdot cares about are handled either by the FCC, Congress, or the Justice Department. Only one of those is affected by the executive branch, and they've had other things to keep them busy these last few years (trampling on our civil liberties, primarily).
Cong
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Umm, no, I think he is trying to say that the democa
Re:Missed a few. (Score:4, Funny)
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Actually, most of us with jobs already have "decent" health care at a "reasonable cost."
Actually, you don't. The US has among the highest health-care costs in the world. Why do you think that people go to Canada or Mexico to get drugs? Are all those retired people and chronically ill people some kind of socialist lefties, because they want to pay reasonable prices for drugs?
The left always has plenty of great ideas for what could be done with other people's money. Your "right" to health care ends where my "right" to property begins. Guess which one is genuine, and which is based in some overinflated sense of entitlement?
That doesn't make any sense - because you are worse off financially because of the corporate-driven health care system. And don't think that just because it's corporate driven they aren't making decisions about your mo
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The only safe bet (Score:5, Funny)
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(search youtube for WoW and "the internet is for porn" if you missed the reference - sorry I can't post the link but the corp firewall blocks youtube)
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-Dr. Cox, 'Scrubs'
Gopher isn't dead! (Score:2, Informative)
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And here's another one [quux.org]. Even The WELL still has its gopher [well.com].
Re:Gopher isn't dead! (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Gopher isn't dead! (Score:4, Funny)
I'm still running a gopher server. Its on an old linux box, but you can't get to it because id doesn't have net access. I also don't have a client for it so i really don't know whats in it.
I think that is where I put my virginity, or a ham sandwitch. Not sure which.
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We had one running until 3 months ago (Score:4, Funny)
1) Ask if anyone is using app.
2) No response
3) Turn app off
4) Six months later, turn app back on because it's "mission critical".
So three months and the clock is still ticking....
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Sadly? Heck no. Having been a systems administrator at the U of MN for several years during Gopher's declining years, I had to suffer through entirely too much Gopher-related nonsense:
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No, but the maintainers of the client code are. At least, I heard that you _really_ don't want to be using MSIE with Gopher these days. Not that you should want to use it for anything else, of course. I just mentioned IE, because I don't know about other Gopher clients.
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I just clicked on a Gopher link from Safari, and it opened Firefox, which duly went and grabbed the gopher 'page'.
Ah the memories.
Security/censorship (Score:2)
"Internet Yellow Pages" (Score:4, Interesting)
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No, that's wrong. Back then, the internet was a truck, instead of it's current form as a series of tubes.
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A year later there was so much of a boom that portals like Yahoo became relevant.
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(Not that it would be hard: I got my current address about two years later...)
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I guess they never figured this whole thing would grow at such a rate. I wonder what other business ventures they came up with and how they fared in the dot com boom/crash.
Worst of '94... TSR vs DikuMUD (Score:2)
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I wonder if it's still up? Doubt it.
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from sometime in the late 70's (Score:3, Funny)
Apu: Could it be used for dating?
Frink: Well, technically, yes, but the computer matches would be so perfect as to eliminate the thrill of romantic conquest.
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Frink: Well, technically, yes, but the computer matches would be so perfect as to eliminate the thrill of romantic conquest.''
OkCupid [okcupid.com] does a fairly good job at that. Bonus points for the first slashdotter to find my profile.
Mercury Site! (Score:2)
WWW (Score:5, Interesting)
Under the list Worst in Net Entertainment:
How little they knew ...
Re:WWW (Score:5, Insightful)
Under the list Worst in Net Entertainment:
How little they knew ...
I believe webspiders, and search engines built around data they collected, were the killer app that made the Web truly useful.
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"Smart searches. The first intelligent agent software packages will emerge, allowing Net users to ask for a specific piece of information like "What is the population of Fiji?" or "How far is Saturn from the Sun?" An agent will go out on the Net , find the information, and return it without the user knowing the source."
They didn't envision google, but they did imagine ask jeeves. Well, except a version of it t
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All links after that seem to be normal search engine hits.
And the parser is pretty intelligent too, I just tried it with "What is a slide rule for?" and got a meaningful answer!
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The problem is that back then, when someone setup a site, they put effort into it. Links usually meant something. Now a days... do links really matter? Not really. Any wikipedia page has hundreds of links---most irrelevant. This page alone has many links---most irrelevant. All internet usage is driven by Google. The problem is that google uses those -links- to rank its content. So google made links irrelevant---and the lack of good links will eventually make
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It would be upwards of 5 years before many people heard of 'Google'. Before then, it was a ridiculously labor intensive hassle to find what you wanted on the WWW.
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As a little anecdote, I had an experience like that just recently with my university. I was trying to find the document detailing the procedures pertaining to graduation, and two forms the student office had told me I needed to find out. Knowing from previou
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Not much has changed, really (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Not much has changed, really (Score:4, Insightful)
Reinvented is right. The "blog" is nothing new; back in 1994 there were probably quite a few of them. Except that lacking the word 'blog,' people just called them 'home pages.' Lots of people used to update their home pages obsessively, just typing in updates to the static HTML from the top down, so older stuff got pushed to the bottom of the page. Eventually when it would get too long, you'd copy and paste it onto a separate page.
What happened, IMO, is that HTML became too complex for the average person to deal with. (This was a combination of the complexity of creating a 'good looking' page increasing, and the technical skill of the average internet user declining.) There was a period of time when personal home pages almost died out, but then blogging software came out and allowed non-technical users to create pages without knowing any HTML.
Similarly, whenever I (have the misfortune to) visit MySpace, it reminds me of the early days of GeoCities and its "free web site" predecessors. Lots of very bad HTML and aesthetically questionable color choices, mostly driven out of vanity.
I think it's pretty safe that no matter where the technology goes, people are always going to want to write about themselves and the stuff they experience on a day to day basis; the tools and technologies for doing that will change, but the drive is always there.
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I don't think that's the problem so much as that people want to create glitzy, unreadable p
Wow (Score:3, Informative)
Andrew Kantor
(ak@mecklermedia.com)
Best:
* Media coverage. Sure, some of that coverage seems clueless, and some of it focuses; foolishly, but not surprisingly; on the seedier side of the Net (such as pornography and electronic stalkers). But 1994 saw the Internet finally hit the mainstr eam. Time and Newsweek now routinely print letters received through e-mail, and more importantly, it's no longer a novelty. The coverage in magazines on the supermarket check-out line has helped make the other "best" things possible.
* On-line shopping. The other best sign that the Net has hit the mainstream. Flowers, pizza, condoms, lobsters, books, music, and more are available, with other products sure to follow. Small companies can now have the same presence as larger ones. Who cares what neighborhood that bookstore is in?
* No more secrets. With more and more people on-line around the world, it's hard for anyone to get away with anything. Sure, a lot of things make their appearance in alt.conspiracies, but the Net has finally come into its own as a news source for the masses. It's no longer strange to hear, "I heard on the Net that Paul's going to have an affair on 'Mad About You.'"
* New providers, more products, and more books. The Internet is proof that capitalism works, and never has that been shown more than in 1994. Big companies like Netcom and AlterNet compete with local providers like Panix, Pipeline, and the Well. Consumers have more choices than ever in access providers, software, and reading material. As usual, the best succeeded and the rest are ending up on the bargain shelf.
Worst:
* Government intervention. They ruined the railroads and the phone companies, and now they're after the Internet. It works like this: Something is good, and private companies are selling it and making it work. The government decides it's a "right," and subsidizes one of those private companies to give it to people who can't afford it. The subsidized company soon runs the competition out of business and becomes a sponsored, sanctioned monopoly. The process has started with the Internet under the guise of "making the Information Superhighway available to everyone." It may sound good at first, but it's a bad idea. We may look back at 1994 as the beginning of the end of the high-quality Net.
* America Online. It let its users onto the Net with only the barest bit of training or preparation. It provided software that made it difficult for even the most savvy user to behave with proper netiquette. But the worst offense is that AOL, like other major on-line services, is taking from the Internet without giving back. Major providers like Alternet, Netcom, and PSI not only put users on the Net, they make available Gopher servers, FTP-able files, and other resources. AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy are only just beginning to do that, and to be proper net.citizens they must make more substance available to the rest of the Net.
* Canter and Siegel. A cheap shot, true, but still one of the worst events of 1994. It's more than simply the fact that they annoyed a few million users in more than 100 countries without showing remorse. The almost-disbarred-from-Tennessee lawyers gave the idea to others, and made people see marketing and sales opportunities that simply don't exist.
* Zealots. They're the people who have decided that they have the right to regulate; with threats or force if necessary; what is available on the Net.
Predictions:
* Cancelbot wars. As spamming and the spam-killing cancelbots become more widespread, people will find their Usenet News messages canceled by someone who simply doesn't like them. Cancelbot software will spread, as people begin editing out opposing view
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I made this mistake yesterday and was gently corrected, so I will now pass the same favor on to you.
Microsoft could not exist without copyright law.
Copyright law is provided and defined by the government.
Microsoft is a government-granted monopoly.
Is this real? (Score:4, Interesting)
Quite accurate actualy... (Score:5, Interesting)
What's truly amazing is how accurate they are, overall. (At least in spirit if not in exact details, which is understandable.) For instance:
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10. Yes: modern search engines. (Although possibly not as 'intelligent' as was hoped.)
Actually, for simple questions like that it works just fine. See this search result [google.com] when asked how far Saturn is from the sun or this [google.com] to see the results for the population of Fiji. Answer: 905,949 (July 2006 Est.)
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#1 - Category and File Size: Content-Type and Content-Length headers in HTTP describe these. Back in '94, everything was just text/html, text/plain, or multipart/alternative (or so it seemed).
#2 - Integration/Domanation: NOT just the web browser. The software he predicted happened the very next year: Windows '94 + Internet Explorer 4. Remember, back in '94 we were still playing with Trumpet Winsock, Crynwr drivers, blah de blah just to get our damned copies of NCSA Mosaic up and run
Just a touch of fill-in (Score:2)
#4: RSS. Not a protocol, but a format. Close enough.
#8a: The easy access ended up coming, oddly enough, in the form of PPP with MSCHAP. Pretty much everyone supports it today and it provides better security than ordinary cleartext password authentication.
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I'd say they're about as intelligent as hoped; At least as expressed in #10. Google pretty much nails it.
"What is the population of Fiji?"
Google's reply: Fiji -- Population: 905,949 (July 2006 Est.)
"How far is Saturn from the Sun?"
Google's reply: Saturn -- Distance From the Sun: Mean: 1427 million KM (9.539 au.) Max: 1507 million KM (10.069 au.) Min: 1347 KM (9.008 au.)
My Major 1995 Prediction Was... (Score:2, Funny)
AOL (Score:2, Funny)
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If I recall correctly, AOL and AOL Users were always been considered bad. Even back then.
I did briefly use it before my campus apartment was wired into the University LAN back in the day. It was like just connecting to a big gateway instead of the internet. I am not sure if its still like that or not.
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If I recall correctly, AOL and AOL Users were always been considered bad. Even back then.
AOL users were considered to be a mass invasion, especially on the insular world of USENET. There was always a problem with "newbies", often at the beginning of a school year, but the numbers were small, integrated rather quickly, and tended to be a lot more techno-savy than the AOL users turned out to be. Just look at USENET postings from around that era and you'll see people ranting about AOL users and this strange
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They did, of course. But they didn't write the warning in all caps, so AOLusers didn't hear it.
We tried... (Score:2)
WWW or gopher? (Score:2)
A year later every dorm room was networked and gopher was history. It was a pretty stunning shift.
I'm pretty glad the newspaper didn't invest a lot of time and effort, in 19
They were right! (Score:5, Interesting)
They were right! [ufoevidence.org]
A Blessing...and a Curse (Score:3, Interesting)
Then, later on...
Now, twelve years on, did we actually get to "sculpt it into something we like" or did the Internet just take on a life of it's own and evolve into the entity that we now have? Also, the answer to the last question in the quote is "Yes...but you can also go broke quick."
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I feel that this is a false dichotomy. By its peer-to-peer nature (in spite of the best efforts of most ISPs to put an end to that) you simply don't have to deal with the parts of the internet you don't like, aside from having packets delivered. This is why net neutrality is so important.
Now, if we lose the net neutrality war, then yes, the internet
gamble, date and vod (Score:2)
Never say never eh.
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Diplomacy (Score:2)
They got this one right, but I think web 2.0 fits it even better than e-mail. (then again I'm a bit biased [kuliukas.com])
Good times (Score:5, Interesting)
I remember those days well. I had home dial-up at 2400 baud, but it was metered and expensive, and I could only afford 20 hours a month.
Then I discovered that my old university's library catalog had a BBS dial-in interface for anybody with a valid student number (easily skimmed from numerous sources on campus). Buried in the catalog system was a primitive gateway to the library's gopher pages, and while it wouldn't let you enter an arbitrary URI, I was able to find the right sequence of links to me to any gopher site on the net.
Then I found an http-gopher gateway that gave me primitive access to the web. From there I found an nttp-http gateway that gave me access to USENET, including all the binary groups. Jackpot!
Man, I downloaded a lot of free porn that summer.
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Time wounds (Score:2)
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Not too wrong... (Score:4, Insightful)
But they really liked usenet. The web forum has supplanted it, but they didn't really see that. http is the monster protocol that gobbled up almost all of the web functions. One poster talks about an application evolving that encapsulated all of the internet protocols in one easy interface. The modern webbrowser is pretty much that, with webmail, webforums, and built in (but less functional) ftp clients.
There are some predictions that are still up in the air. Do people prefer moderated content? It's hard to say. Sure, lots of people read cnn.com, but lots of people post on unmoderated forums, or use myspace, or other "user-generated" content.
I think the biggest thing they missed was data-mining. They thought people had to be involved in searching for information, in moderating content, etc in a centralized way. Using links, pageviews, user reviews, and user moderation some systems can organize themselves. (This isn't to cast doubt on experts. I still prefer a good editor to 1000 monkeys.)
And I guess one more thing: the whole idea of "everybody" is silly on the net. If a million people use usenet, it's still useful. The fact that ten or a hundred times more people use some sort of webforum is in many ways irrelevant. Both exist side-by-side. The first list on the article listed online Diplomacy as a fun game on the net. It still exists, probably with about the same number of players. Not anywhere near some flashgame sites in traffic, sure, but that doesn't change anything.
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It's a great prediction because ISDN and DSL both suck ass. SDSL is slow and all other DSL is both asymmetric and asynchronous, thus further contributing to the demise of the peer-to-peer internet. ISDN of course was both slow and expensive, at least in most markets. Before the mergers recently, SBC offered flat-rate ISDN for like $80/mo, with internet access, etc. Today SBC-Pacbell (dunno about
Security predictions (Score:3, Funny)
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And I'm still hoping for the day when forums approach the same level of usefulness as usenet. Threading, anyone? There's something to be said for the old way of doing things aside from commenting on that they're old, or pointing to the size of the surge of the great unwashed masses rushing to adopt something different.
Speaking of which, I'd happily fork over the bucks if CmdrTa