Predicting Internet

Many of us older programmers or older computer enthusiasts have lived the wonderful era of the beginning of mainstream computing (circa 1981): BBSs existed. Forums also. E-mail I understand also.

But who could have ever thought that one day we'd communicate widely by computers, that we could shop from our computer, post an opinion on a forum, on a wiki, fight a virtual war with a person a thousand miles away, visit libraries via our computers and all the possibilities Internet offers. Not many I would say.

Even Bill Gates, who is - no matter what we think of him - at the forefront of computing, was not able to predict Internet. I wasn't either. Many so called experts were't able either.

Now anyone who dreamily looked at a BBS and said to himself/herself: this thing is going to get big and all the computers in the world will be one day be connected with each other, those of you who had this thought, you had predicted Internet.

Anyone among us has predicted Internet?

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I predicted it would fail in 1987. A friend of mine connected his home 3B1 to the first local non-educational, non-governmental ISP. He said lots of folks were doing it and it was going to big some day. He showed me how he could telnet to sites all over the world, just like I had done at college years before. I thought it would never make financial sense. I couldn't see how single users like him could pay for the infrastructure he was using.

I was wrong about that (so far :-)), but I was right 10 years later when dot coms were IPO'ing with business plans that showed they would lose money on each transaction but make it up in volume.

-- EricHodges

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Your friend has indeed predicted Internet. He followed the axiom that whatever a few people like now is one day going to be mainstream and big! Well sure I agree it is not sound financially for most companies but for others like ISP providers among many, it is a gold mine! -- ar

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Past usage is a good indicator about where the internet is going to go in the future:

 Illustated by the following graph: 

Reports available on many facets of internet use also shed light on what has and will likely happen:

 http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/779/govtaff/factsNStats/FactsNstats.html

See VictorianInternet.