Computer networks worldwide will feature 3-D animated graphics, radio and cellular phone-links to portable computers, as well as fax, voice, and high-definition television. A multimedia global circus! Or so it’s hoped – and planned. The real Internet of the future may bear very little resemblance to today’s plans. Planning has never seemed to have much to do with the seething, fungal development of the Internet. After all, today’s Internet bears little resemblance to those original grim plans for RAND’s post-holocaust command grid. It’s a fine and happy irony.
Predictor: Sterling, Bruce
Prediction, in context:In a 1993 article he wrote for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Bruce Sterling says: ”The future of the Internet bids fair to be bigger and exponentially faster. Commercialization of the Internet is a very hot topic today, with every manner of wild new commercial-information service promised. The federal government, pleased with an unsought success, is also still very much in the act. NREN, the National Research and Education Network, was approved by the U.S. Congress in fall 1991, as a five-year, $2 billion project to upgrade the Internet ‘backbone.’ NREN will be some 50 times faster than the fastest network available today, allowing the electronic transfer of the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica in one hot second. Computer networks worldwide will feature 3-D animated graphics, radio and cellular phone-links to portable computers, as well as fax, voice, and high-definition television. A multimedia global circus! Or so it’s hoped – and planned. The real Internet of the future may bear very little resemblance to today’s plans. Planning has never seemed to have much to do with the seething, fungal development of the Internet. After all, today’s Internet bears little resemblance to those original grim plans for RAND’s post-holocaust command grid. It’s a fine and happy irony.”
Biography:Bruce Sterling, a writer, consultant and science fiction enthusiast, wrote or co-wrote “Schismatrix,” “The Hacker Crackdown” and “The Difference Engine” and edited “Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology.” In the 1990s, he wrote tech articles for Fortune, Harper’s, Details, Whole Earth Review and Wired, where he was a contributing writer from its founding. He published the nonfiction book “Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years” in 2002. (Author/Editor/Journalist.)
Date of prediction: February 1, 1993
Topic of prediction: Communication
Subtopic: General
Name of publication: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
Title, headline, chapter name: Short History of the Internet
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.forthnet.gr/forthnet/isoc/short.history.of.Internet
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Uhlfelder, Evelyn C.