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That's not what he wrote; he wrote that "cyberspace isn't, and will never be, nirvana". And that is perfectly accurate, since Kurt Cobain died a year before he wrote that and therefore, has not been online.
He seems to be a misanthrope who completely underestimated others' misanthropy. Heh. (Really, avoiding salespeople is the NUMBER ONE reason I like shopping online.)
Kind of agree, Hugh, but I think he underestimated mass culture's ability to digest and filter the randomness out there. Not that the hive mind does a perfect job, but the possible role of that "mind" is, I think, exactly what's missing from his perspective.
Then again, could I have predicted anything meaningful about the internet in '95? Not at all. I figured it would just be this weird fringe thing that university kids and researchers used, that the technological hurdles to getting online would never become manageable for the masses.
"Then there's cyberbusiness. We're promised instant catalog shopping--just point and click for great deals. We'll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?"
Lulz. There were a total of $133.7 billion in "cyberbusiness" sales in 2008 (more than $11 billion per month). Or roughly $100 million in one afternoon.
In February 1995, I was still six months away from logging into the internet for the first time via kermit over a 2400 baud modem but I remember reading that article and thinking that it was rubbish. He was right about most of the problems but for some reason saw them as roadblocks and not problems to solve.
... no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.
The first really usable web browser (Mosaic V2, which implemented HTML v2.0) was not released for general use until October 1995, eight months after this article was written. I remember being shown a demo of Mosaic 2.0 Beta, in mid 1995 and suddenly realizing how all of these online databases could be really useful for research.
So the author is right - when the article was written, you needed to be pretty technical to access the Internet and you would have seen it as a collection of databases, accessed via teletype terminal functions. It was the invention of an HTML-based browser, not web access, that changed society.
octothorpe - only early text browser versions, with html v1.0 were available before 1995. The public would not have had much access to these - they were mainly distributed via academic networks. So their influence would have been minimal. It was not until HTML v2.0 that graphical browsers became available. That was the end of 1995.
Wait, no, Susurration. I first saw Mosaic sometime around Christmas 1993. When I saw your post I wondered for a moment whether I was remembering it wrong, but apparently not.
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