Fifteen years ago this week, Clifford Stoll told Newsweek readers that the Internet was a fad that would fail and fade away.Enjoy!
Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.
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.
... How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.
... Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping--just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. 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.
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HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
ReplyDeleteGeez, even I was smarter than that in 1995, including Usenet groups in the first edition of "Dogs For Dummies."
He assumed that because the technology didn't exist at the time that it never would. I've encountered that attitude in IT professionals over the years, hanging out with my husband. Everything is evaluated in terms what is there now. Complete lack of imagination. Didn't any of these guys ever watch Star Trek?
ReplyDeleteI remember being around (circa 1985) when an IBM'er who was working in the emerging field of computer graphics was told that an "erase" function was needed for a new vector drawing program. His reply was "It can't be done and there's no business case for it anyway" or words to that effect.
Stoll wrote a book in 1995 called "Silicon Snake Oil; Second Thoughts on the Information Highway". My husband, the IT guy, has it on his bookshelf, purchased when it came out.
He told me just now that he met Stoll once. His reaction was that Stoll didn't seem to be able to talk about anything but his own storyline. And that everything had to fit into his own rigid philosophical/ideological constructs.
Psssst...Dude, things have a funny way of "evolving". Fire up that wood-burning dial-up, use The Google and see if anything's changed yet...
ReplyDeleteSeahorse ;)