[WikiEN-l] The Internet? Bah!

[Gwern Branwen]

On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 5:13 PM, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/11/17 Nathan <nawrich at gmail.com>:
>> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 1:07 PM, stevertigo <stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>> http://www.newsweek.com/id/106554
>>> Linked and digged from a current article. Quite chuckleworthy.
>
>> Now that it is what it is, any idiot can look back and say it was
>> obvious what would happen. Far more people got it wrong 15-20 years
>> ago, and I guess its good for a chuckle (especially since this
>> particular writer was so condescending) - but hindsight is as perfect
>> as foresight is rare.
>
>
> And at least Clifford Stoll actually knew what the heck he was talking
> about, unlike most media pontificators at the time.
>
>
> - d.

Which makes his article and his book _Silicon Snake Oil_ all the
worse: he knew better! (Although as an astronomer turned sysadmin who
hasn't done anything interesting since, I'm not sure how much we could
credit Stoll with in terms of history & sociology & trends.)

For example: "None answers my question, and my search is periodically
interrupted by messages like, "Too many connectios, try again later.""

Seriously, Cliff? Seriously? This is your idea of a cogent point, that
bandwidth sucked in '95? Yet you should've known perfectly well about
all the fiber being put in, that broadband tech like ADSL and cable
modems were realities in not just the labs but were becoming
commercial tech, that all the trends - all! - said that bandwidth
would just keep on going up.

"Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that
we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh,
sure."

Amazon was founded in '94, and started selling books just a few months
after this article. And Amazon was by no means the first to sell books
online. And his prediction we would never read books on computers,
with Kindle, has obviously been falsified. (E-paper, incidentally, was
first invented in the '70s, and the early '90s saw the development of
what Kindle would use, e-ink.)

And his 2 paragraphs on e-commerce? Equally risible. We can forgive
him for thinking salespeople necessary. (Although I can't; what, did
mail-order not prove in the *previous* century that salespeople were
unnecessary?) But saying that there was no way to send money online is
both ignorant and stupid. What, had banks for all the 20th century
been schlepping around documents and whatnot in cars and trains? No,
by '95, they had long been using electronic methods, routed over -
*computer networks*. Astonishing. (Paypal, BTW, was founded 1998.)

Cliff gets exactly *1* thing right: that computers will be largely
useless in juvenile education. When your competition is a stopped
clock and your predictions could be seen to be wrong or dubious even
before they were made, you know your prognosticating skills are bad.

-- 
gwern