First Nation in Cyberspace
[The Internet culture of the early ’90s is] a perfect Marxist state, where almost nobody does any business. But at some point that will have to change.
Archives: Expert Predictions
First Nation in Cyberspace
The system could evolve in one of two ways: Either entrepreneurs will manage to set up shop on a free-market version of the Internet, or some consortium will take the whole thing over and turn it into a giant CompuServe. “That’s an outcome,” O’Reilly says, “that would effectively destroy the Internet as we know it.”
First Nation in Cyberspace
I feel kind of sad about it. [The early Internet, before commercialization] was such a dynamic, pulsing thing. I wonder whether we shouldn’t have left it alone.
Chapter Three: Visionaries and Convergences: The Accidental History of the Net
Entire ecosystems of Net-spawned information-seeking robots will be circulating through the Net … How you protect the community from dangers of attack without destroying the openness that makes the community valuable is a social problem, as is the problem of who should pay for access to this increasingly powerful pool of knowledge tools.
Author Backs Freedom of Online Expression – Concerns Raised on Control of Data Highway
Limiting expression in content could eviscerate CMCs and at the same time turn a data highway into an easily exploited propaganda tool.
Communication Manifesto: A Plugged-in Author Looks at the Brave New World of Writing for the Internet
[People may pay more to join “private rooms” with authors or like-minded authorities to extend topics raised by paper-based Wired articles. Advertisers presumably will pay to reach those select markets] … I undoubtedly am naive about all this and will get crushed like a bug. But there is a place in the world for getting good, honest information about things for sale.
Let the E-mailer Beware: Perturbations, Pleasures and Predicaments on the Information Superhighway
You’re always going to have hackers trying to get into the system … Hackers are smart and they’re bored. A lot of these people don’t have a life, or a job.
The Bandwidth Tidal Wave
The chief beneficiaries of all this invention … will be the people of the world, ascending to new pinnacles of prosperity in an Information Age … Communications bandwidth is not only the secret of electronic progress. It is also the heart of economic growth, stretching the webs of interconnection that extend the reach of markets and the realms of opportunity … The advance of the telecosm offers unprecedented hope to the masses of people whom the industrial revolution passed by.
The Bandwidth Tidal Wave
The microprocessor will become a vestigial link to the legacy systems such as word processing and spreadsheets that once defined the machine. All of this means that while the last two decades have been the epoch of the computer industry, the next two decades will belong to the suppliers of digital networks.
The Bandwidth Tidal Wave
The value-added of the network will so exceed the value-added of the CPU that your future computer will be rated not in mips but in gigabits per second. Bragging rights will go not to the person with the fastest CPU but to the person with the fastest network – and associated database lookup, browsing and information retrieval engines.