Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny

Chapter One – Introduction

We will all become mighty morphing cyborgs capable of reconfiguring ourselves by the minute … Think of yourself on some evening in the not-so-distant future, when wearable, fitted, and implanted electronic organs connected by bodynets are as commonplace as cotton; your intimate infrastructure connects you seamlessly to a planetful of bits, and you have software in your underwear.

I had (and still have) a dream that the Web could be less of a television channel and more of an interactive sea of shared knowledge. I imagine it immersing us as a warm, friendly environment made of the things we and our friends have seen, heard, believe or have figured out. I would like it to bring our friends and colleagues closer, in that by working on this knowledge together we can come to better understandings … The dream is that if everybody works from day to day using the Web as their notebook, mailer and calendar … then the scaling problems of teams and organizations could somehow be solved. This is a dream.

Interview: Marc Andreessen

ISDN isn’t inevitable because the phone companies haven’t been able to make it inevitable. I think 14.4 and 28.8 [modem speeds] are sufficient for some that things you want to do, and they are a practical constraint right now. I think all of us just can wait to be delivering 10 Mbit/s. You won’t have any multimedia problems then.

Interview: Marc Andreessen

I think one of the exciting things that going to happen over the next three or four years is cable Internet access. High-bandwidth cable access to the home ought to start becoming a reality if it’s ever going to. That should really open up the floodgates for what you can do interactively.

The Executive Computer; Hands Off the Keys, Noses Into Books

The advent of cyberspace will have profound effects on so-called post-industrial culture, and the material and economic rewards for those who first and most properly conceive and implement cyberspace systems will be enormous.

The Cipper Chip: Should the Government Control the Master Keys to Electronic Commerce?

As the Administration sticks to the principle of key escrow but is willing to adjust the details, and as businesses begin to think about what kind of encryption they want, we’re likely to see a certain amount of convergence on this issue and I suspect it will make a difference in the export control laws over the next year or two.

Interview: Marc Andreessen

Netscape is … building in the ability to understand the Java language and support it as an execution environment on both the client side and the server side. Then it’s just a general-purpose language. Third parties will be able to create class libraries that layer on top of it that support different ways to easily write applications. Third parties will also be able to write full-fledged applications in it.

Interview: Marc Andreessen

You want to be able to have a mechanism where you are downloading the audio on the fly and you’re storing up a sufficient amount of it so that it plays cleanly. The same is true of video, with fast-forward and rewind in video. These are things that require support on the server side. It’s going to get richer on both ends, and the protocols in the middle are going to have to get richer at the same time.

Building the Information Marketplace

With the growing use and falling cost of fiber-optics, sending high-resolution video at a hundred million characters per second might someday cost no more than a long-distance phone call costs today.