Why the Web and Why NOW!

The telegraph is the ancestor of just about everything modern we know today, and this year it’s 150 years old. I think it’s fitting that this is also the first year that the Internet fully sheds its experimental status and takes its place as a fledgling medium along with print and TV. Like the telegraph, the Internet will surely spawn all kinds of inventions and new ways of doing things, things we can’t imagine today. And someday, strangely enough, our descendants will look back at 1994, the year of the birth of the Internet-as-medium, as the old days and wonder how in the world we ever got by with such primitive technology!

Why the Web and Why NOW!

For a little perspective on where we are right now, let’s take a look at this picture. It’s from the cover of a magazine that was published in 1925 called Radio Broadcast … “Who is to pay for broadcasting and how?” Sound familiar? Well, we worked it out somehow and we’ll work it out somehow with the Internet.

Why the Web and Why NOW!

The Internet is another viable way to force distribution. I would look at it that way, if I were you.

Why the Web and Why NOW!

We’re talking about taking technology that we already have, figuring out how to pay for it, and installing it. So the bandwidth problems, when they’ll be solved, I don’t know how, but the solutions are inevitable.

Why the Web and Why NOW!

“Is this is a real medium? Is this something that’s going to last? Is it really going to grow?” My answer to that is another question: “Does it fill a need?” And the answer to that question is – yes.

Why the Web and Why NOW!

Let’s get rid of this idea that we’re trying to create some alternate world that’s going to be completely independent of all the other medias that exist. What we’re really doing right now is learning how the Internet fits in amongst all these existing medias. To integrate the different medias so that they support and coordinate with each other.

Cyberspace 2020

Historians of the future – provided good dreams prevail – will view this [development] as having been far more crucial to the survival of democracy in the United States than rural electrification or the space program … Access to cyberspace may well represent nothing less than this nation’s last and best hope of providing something like a level socio-economic playing field for a true majority of its citizens.

Digital Dreamer

Will TVs turn into PCs or vice versa? Vice versa, period … By the year 2005, he’s convinced, Americans will spend more hours on the Internet (or whatever it’s called) than watching network television. … he dreams of computers that are more like people, able to hear and see their personal users, recognize their smiles and frowns and foibles, have a sense of humor, too, and able to “converse” with all the other microchips in your house … It’s an infectiously optimistic, some would say visionary view of a world of wristwatch computers with more power than today’s desktop PCs, of personalized digital “newspapers” (the Daily Me), and fridges that don’t just notice that you’re out of milk, they remind your car to pick some up on the way home.