It’s coming up to 10 years since I first encountered the Internet, stumbling slack-jawed onto the superhighway with Gopher, NCSA Mosaic (which has already had it’s 10th birthday party) and Cello.
It’s making me think about what’s happened in the last 10 years: both personally in terms of going from studying to create one kind of architecture to practising another; and more generally – in terms of the hopes, hype and unintended consequences of the web and associated technologies.
So – in the assumption you have some of the same shared experiences as me, two [big] questions for you:
- What did you think, 10 years ago in 1993 when you first saw graphical web-browsers, would be the consquences in 2003?
- Bearing that in mind, what do you think are the major disruptive trends, technological or otherwise right now – and what will they make 2013 look like?
Not going to start with mine… but I’m going to try and throw up a Kwiki somewhere to capture the main themes, but for now, please use the comments form…
Petafloptimism 
It was 1994 for me, I was enrolling on the MA in Critical Theory at Sussex having written an undergrad dissertation on hypertext & critical theory. I’d gone to Sussex to expand this to include online stuff, so I was one of the few students to sign up to the computer centre’s ‘intro to the internet’ course.
I’d been using USENET and email before, so I signed up mainly as a way of getting my email account sorted. The library tech guy showed us gopher etc, which was fun. I hung around afterwards to chat to him and he said ‘oh, you’re gonna love this’ and showed me Mosaic.
I’d love to say I had some ground-breaking paradigm-shift moment, but of course I didn’t. If I had I’d be richer, but not wiser. What I did think was “ooh, I wonder how that affects on-line identity” as this was what interested – and still interests – me, as I was reading all the early sociology stuff coming out of peoples studying USENET groups. Of course, it hasn’t affected online identity formation at all, as USENET begat text chat, IM et al. and the web just kinda happened around it all, providing some pretty pictures and surrounding the experience like a tsunami. Same shit, different protocol.
Seeing as I didn’t correctly predict the effect of the web then, despite being perfectly placed to, I’m loathe to predict anything for 2013. But, being tempted, I’d say presence – i.e. the mapping of one person to one number, whether that’s phone, IP or whatever, is the big social change that’s happening now. We expect the technology to confirm or deny the presence of someone at the end of our network. Our tolerance for someone’s lack of presence given the communication tools we’ve got is already low. Within a few years you’ll be presumed dead if, somehow, you’re not pingable.
1. I was sitting in ICS21(1993) on a presentation on the Internet…my first impression when the prof was pulling up some image from web…”boy is that slow!” 😉 I can’t remember the connection speed, but remembered he was downloading something from the east coast. Other things I was connected to…gopher/usenet/mudds&moos/ytalk/…
2. Disruptive, um. Hard to tell(agree with Chris), but it’s still going to be technologies that connect people to each other.
I had no idea what the web would look like in 2003. The web in 1993 was astonishing and captivating enough; and perhaps the reason there was little sense of foresight in those early stumblings (Mosaic & MOO & Gopher & USEnet etc.) was the incredible sense of ‘nowness’, of thisness, haeccity, in the interactions it made possible. I mean, I’d read about EssexMUD in ‘MicroAdventurer’ back in the early 90s, but it was networks that re-fired my interest in computing, because of the immediacy it brought to things.
Disruptive trends now? Ubiquitous access, combined with expanded storage capacity, which makes for just-in-time retrieval. Which is kind of like Chris’s ‘pingable future’; the idea that being networked could become an opt-out rather than an opt-in.
1. I completely missed the potential of the Web. I’d gone from being a CDROM developer to a gopher developer, and the Web looked to me like a way to build some of the richness of the CDROM UI/UE into the net.coolth of gopher. Missed the end-to-end stuff, the open stuff, the stadnards-defined stuff…
2. God, you’ve got me here. The problem with being an sf writer is that you don’t make *predictions*, you tell *plausible stories* about the future. I can come up with a bunch of plausible stories, but no predictions, I’m afraid… The important concepts, though are:
* Copyright
* Control
* Standardization
* Universal machine-ness
1) The first time I saw the web back in 1993, I was working as a technical writer, and I knew that I was looking at the future of my line of work. I was all excited and called my boss into my office and showed it to him, but he didn’t get it. Six months later, he was asking me if I’d heard of something called Mosaic. Yes, I replied, I demoed it for you six months ago….
Ten years previously, in college, my professors were telling me about how computers, publishing, and broadcasting were all going to converge. They thought it was going to be teletext, but that never caught on here in the U.S., unlike the situation in Holland and the U.K. So when I saw the web, I immediately recognized that this was the fulfillment of what my professors were telling me about. I figured it would be big.
That said, I had no idea it would get as big as it has, and I still shake my head whenever I see a URL in an advertisement. I thought it would probably remain the domain of the technically inclined.
2) I suppose the big disruptive technologies today are wireless access, XML-based interchange vocabularies, and maybe the miniaturization of access (cell phones, PDAs and the like). The XML stuff will just grease the wheels of commerce on a business-to-business level. It’ll be huge, but the average Joe won’t really be aware of it. The combination of wireless access and miniaturization may make it impossible to ever escape from work, assuming we still have work. Oh yeah, that’s the other big trend; all our jobs are going to go to India….
First saw a graphical browser, probably Mosaic or Netscape 1 at Mackerel where the focus was on CD and floppy! based interactives. I was sharing an ISDN line over Localtalk so the impression was less than mind blowing. I still think that email, while a far simpler technology, has had a lot more impact on most people than the web.
Re 2013 I think the coming split is going to be between attention-getters (Cory, Joey deVilla etc.) and sneaky communication . The interesting question will be the measurement of choice, will it be a star factor (eg every one knows about XXX) or tech/geek factor (eg you and I know about XXX and that makes us cool/in the know)
1. I was at uni from 92 to 95 and the internet was something a few geeky types were getting into – wasn’t until 2 or 3 years later it started happening at work.
2. As for the future, I would expect all TV/film etc. to be downloadable at will, making many people’s experience much more standardised.
I guess directed advertising will be much more prevalent, but hopefully there’ll be options to avoid it entirely – though that may come at a price?
Agree with the comment about b2b communication being huge, but almost entirely behind the scenes.
As for copyright, I can’t help but think if the providers (of whatever) could only bring the price down sufficiently, banking on massively increased volume, people wouldn’t have the same interest in pirating.
i first got on the web with AOL in 1995. Started creating my own webpages shortly after that with AOL Personal Publisher, then moved to Notepad. Have handcoded ever since.
I think the web in 2003 is beginning to look a lot like the web when it first started. You are seeing a grassroots push towards a minimal design style without a lot of photos and colors and blinking text or text scrolling across the page.
It’s all a bit of a blur. It was Summer of 1994, and I’d been trotting out Caught In The Net, which was mostly about Usenet. My obsession was many-to-many, the idea of the Network of Equals, and I saw everything as a metaphor for that. When I saw Mosaic, it was the mystery of these *pictures* being delivered by a bucket-brigade of machines across the world that impressed me. It seemed like a very visual demonstratrion of what I’d been trying to tell people without visual aids. Ftp’ing into NASA just didn’t have the same impact as showing people NASA pictures, and then asking them where they thought I got them from, and then describing how we were talking to NASA”s computer in California, right then.
I saw the Web as an explanation, a demonstration, rather than as a tool in itself. I always thought they’d be a big gang of protocols. I went on endlessly, and still do, about the Net being a meta-medium – a place where new media could spring up at any moment.
In the end, I realised that the Web was a meta-medium too: that because it was easier to understand, it was a better bucket to drop new media into. It wasn’t just the world’s best technology demo, it was the world’s best demo framework.
I think I’d imagined by 2003, the Web wouldn’t just be seen through the window of the browser, that it would have filled out to take over the rest of the desktop (I really had no belief that the desktop would vanish. The desktop still felt too new to die so quickly.).
I think that vision of the Web and the Net got implemented by Microsoft with their Active Desktop (which turned out to be not what people really wanted). Maybe these days it lives in those little translucent mini-Net applets you see on MacOS X, and IM too maybe.
It was a pretty prosaic vision, actually, but I think all predictions look a little parochial compared to the present. I didn’t so much get it wrong, as get it uninteresting. There are infinitely better crazier and more dangerous niches the Net explored than just the corners of my desktop.
The Web in 2013? I think it’ll just be there, like the radio in your mother’s kitchen or a magazine on the living room floor. I hope that connection speeds will have upped a bit, and so I imagine that it’ll have a different feel from less latency, quicker rendering. More like clicking through a hypercard stack than that slow-moving “browsing” metaphor. bang, bang, bang, bang. Like hitting the channel-changer on the remote – or at least old remotes, before digital TV slowed down that reassuring flicker.
I imagine there’s some perceptual threshold you cross when the latency and the response-speed changes when you click on a link. Like the change between a flickering set of similiar pictures, and a movie. When the space between Websites feels instantaneous, rather than a small journey, we’ll see what the Web will be like in 2013, and what it’ll be like for a while after that.
oh, maybe.
I thought it all looked a bit crummy to be honest. I too was at Sussex, and came across it in 93 while doing Artificial Intelligence at COGS. Things were just the same as now, in that some smug spotty nerd wanted to show off how up with the New Technology he was, so showed me Mosaic. Well, tried to, it took a lot of fiddling to get the whole thing working, but work it finally did. That’s changed at least.
I remember seeing a BT advert a few years after this which said, “Some day your email address may be more important than your phone number.” For some people it *is* now. I sincerely hope the next 10 years shifts us away from the idea of a single computer being a *thing* that sits there, and more towards task-based devices. The internet will be as important to us (and as disregarded as) the water mains or the power supply. We’ll only notice it if it stops working. The big things that are going to cause problems are the erosions of civil liberties in recent years. You can be prosecuted if someone else puts illegal material on your machine *now*, and people in the UK are being prosecuted for saying socially/morally incorrect words. The internet could end up as another tool of oppression by a nascent fascist state, ours this time… I worry.
I was sat in the basement of the language centre at UCL in Gower street, problem on an IBM RS6000 running AIX. it was NCSA mosaic, and this would have been the first page I looked at
http://www.ucl.ac.uk (it looks slicker now, but like so much of the web, no better)
the first pictures I *remember* loking at were NASA’s.
for 2013:
Digital Rights Management will not succeed.
Corporations will still be playing catch up to the sites that enthusiastic amateurs create, and wasting billions in the process.
To a reasonable approximation, all human knowledge will be available on the web.
The British government will still be trying to make a decent website.
Privacy will be over, and people will have adapted. New forms of etiquette will develop to cope. It will be socially unacceptable to use a video-camera-gps-facial-recognition phone to google for that girl you fancy, standing at a bar.
We will all be embarrassed when we look up this page on the Wayback machine.
cars will be over.
I was a late arrival to graphic browsers. I’d played around a little on PRESTEL and bulletin boards but had soon dismissed it as geeks talking languages I didn’t understand. Graphic browsers surely would just be geeks displaying pictures I wouldn’t get either (except for the porn).
In my defence, I was still at school, and “computer” meant something with an 8-bit owl printed on the corner. Just as I was leaving, my school had eventually graduated to 3 RM Nimbus’s, but they weren’t hooked up together, let alone to a phone line. Even when I saw browsers taking shape in 94, it was to witness some hand-drawn cartoons and a few dark pictures from NASA. I couldn’t get my head around why the non-techy public would ever want in – and so all developments in that field would remain strictly IT-centric.
At the time, the workstation was still king and the only connection of any importance would be a way of extending your local network to include your home. For anything involving greater distances, you’d be better off posting each other a disk (and we did, often, wrapped in a single sheet of lined A4 paper. Every one got through fine). I had foolishly underestimated people’s appetite for both supplying and collecting information.
I ‘got it’ late, in 1996, by which point Netscape and Jerry’s Guide were going strong and it was obvious to everyone what was beginning and what would have happened by 2003. Every home in the world would have ISDN lines, the TV would no longer exist and use of flash would, of course, be compulsory for any website, using animation so cool that nobody would ever want to skip an intro.
As for what’s out there now that I’m blindly underestimating, for me the future lies in the potential consequences of RSS, remote bookmarking, IMAP, server-side technology – and, perhaps, the Active Desktop in reverse.
The first ten years has seen the development of what and how information is distributed. I believe that the new trends will be focussed even more on where.
By 2013, the information you access will of course depend on the medium you use – but every medium will access your same one server. An ipod will use your music folder and download your top RSS feeds. Instead of teletext on the TV, you’ll surf your web bookmarks. The Tivo will get the films you own. Your phone will show the goals saved in your folder by the service you subscribe to. You and your server will take responsibility for the download speed, not them.
For normal computer usage and to play with your folders, you’ll have small tablet-style terminals with keyboards. With virtually no hard drive, just a shell OS and a basic processor, all the power will be at the server end. You pay to upgrade your server to the latest spec (and perhaps buy wireless stereo speakers), rather than buying a new machine or sticking in new chips. To get to at our information, all we’ll need is one of these ‘remote slim-tops’. People will no longer own computers – merely the information they’ve accumulated, and Britain will utilise its disused coal mines to become the storage capital of the world.
And it’ll mostly be used by geeks swapping porn and saying things I still don’t understand. Game of Frogger, anyone?
It was the end of 93 or the beginning of 94 when I first saw the web at work and became interested right away. Being a designer, I was excited with each release of the “NEW” browser Netscape, more and more thing could be done with it.
I wrote in 1993 “In the new digital world, designer must reassess their role. We have the responsibility to translate what was once the immutable truth in what will become the building block of the new communication.”
Talking a little bit more about Multimedia that the Web, and not to be taken too seriously, I was taking big words to let designer know that we must be involve with how the web was growing and how content was viewed. What we would like to see on the web and not how corporation would want he web to evolve.
Bad thing started to happen when designer started to demands great design and Macromedia released Flash. So now, almost every designer i know, doesn’t see a problem in designing a website with only Flash, a totally closed document with so many usability problem it’s too long to list.
The other big (bad) trend is the big corporation that wants to turn the Web into a big TV, I don’t want another TV, I already got one.
I have no idea how the web ill be in 2013 but I hope it won’t be too commercial, I’m not holding my breath on this one 😉
I’m going to talk about my first experience with the web, but bide my time as to where the next ten years are going. Hope that’s alright 🙂
When I was in sixth grade, quietly developing a mind meld with the school’s computer lab of 20 Mac Classics, I would spend a lot of my off-class time surfing InfoMac for interesting programs.
Eventually, I found a Gopher client, probably a month after I started; digging through the gopher archives, I realized that something cool was going on, and started paying attention to how things linked together.
A week or so later, I found NCSA Mosaic, first version. It opened, and pointed me to a page that had a lot of text, and then blue bits of text with underlines. When the pointer hit the blue text, it changed — so I clicked!
Then everything changed.
I think it was either 94 or 95. I had eschewed all knowledge or want to learn anything about computers at that point and was doing the least applicable course I could find, a combination of French existentialism and Egyptology. I had had a falling out with science and technology, long story about computers being tools and me not wanting to spend the rest of my life fixing screw drivers.
I was visiting a friend who was a computer science tutor in his tiny shared shoebox of an office and he showed me the latest version of Netscape. It was version 1 or maybe a point release, could well have been 2, it’s all a bit hazy now. All I really remember is that there was a button on the toolbar that was took you to a random page somewhere on the Internet… A “I’m feeling truly lucky” button. The first time I used it I was taken to some weird female body building personal homepage/site.
Even in 95 most of the web was still at CERN, or at least that’s what it seemed to me. All the stuff I wanted to look at that was on the web (astro and particle physics mind you) seemed to either be on CERN or NASA sites. I sort of had that cyberspace feeling of seeing these huge towering data structures and all the other tiny homepages hanging off them like leeches or growing in the shadows like weeds (maybe a bit unkind, how about orchids, pretty parasites).
My general feeling was like reading Neuromancer, which I had done over 10 years before that point. I suddenly saw the reality of the global computer network. I had encountered the internet before. My father had shown me email and old chat stuff in the early early 80s and I had played in MUDs, on stuff like CompuServe and spent far far too much time messing around on BBS’s. But all that had always felt like very small worlds. The web made me, and I think a lot of other people realise how big the Internet was and how big it could become.
The government will be the big disruptive force. 10 years is long enough to see governments and laws change. One too many paedophile cases might clamp down the screws on interpersonal communication software, lifting of libel publishing laws. Snooping and privacy stuff could go either way, my feeling is that more will happen. As it become easier to do (more computing power to people ratio) the government will see it as an easy way to monitor things. On top of that national or global government could change many of the ways in which the Internet bureaucracy works.
The interesting trend with the web over the last 10 years is that it has swung the client/server balance back to the server. Browsers have become more than just a way to read content stored somewhere else, no longer are they just distributed newspapers. There is enough in them now to make them full blown client software, the web has become a network of fat servers and thin clients. The next 10 years I think will see a swing back the other way, (I hope) not a stupid swing to fat browsers but one in which the paradigm might move towards specialist client download. Where Flash is going is a good example of how this might be achieved. Java was always there to do it but the M$ steamroller has stopped that from becoming truly universal just by making it more difficult for your punter to manage. This kind of distributed computing where the application (and/or developers) decides what is relevant to keep server side and what ought to be pushed client side to make it more efficient.
Thats more of a continuation of current trends and not a major upset. I almost think that well have another 10 years (give or take) of slowly evolving status quo and around 2010 well have another big paradigm shift. Maybe it will be something to do with grid computing, maybe the semantic web style things will suddenly become more workable. But I think possibly a major technological disruptive development will be localised AI, animal smarts computers, but ones that go beyond rule sets into learned and adaptive heuristics. That will enable a huge amount of the wishful thinking that is going on now and ease a bunch of development problems.
I was visiting a friend who was a computer science tutor in his tiny shared shoebox of an office and he showed me the latest version of Netscape. It was version 1 or maybe a point release, could well have been 2, it’s all a bit hazy now. All I really remember is that there was a button on the toolbar that was took you to a random page somewhere on the Internet… A “I’m feeling truly lucky” button. The first time I used it I was taken to some weird female body building personal homepage/site.
Even in 95 most of the web was still at CERN, or at least that’s what it seemed to me. All the stuff I wanted to look at that was on the web (astro and particle physics mind you) seemed to either be on CERN or NASA sites. I sort of had that cyberspace feeling of seeing these huge towering data structures and all the other tiny homepages hanging off them like leeches or growing in the shadows like weeds (maybe a bit unkind, how about orchids, pretty parasites).
My general feeling was like reading Neuromancer, which I had done over 10 years before that point. I suddenly saw the reality of the global computer network. I had encountered the internet before. My father had shown me email and old chat stuff in the early early 80s and I had played in MUDs, on stuff like CompuServe and spent far far too much time messing around on BBS’s. But all that had always felt like very small worlds. The web made me, and I think a lot of other people realise how big the Internet was and how big it could become.
The government will be the big disruptive force. 10 years is long enough to see governments and laws change. One too many paedophile cases might clamp down the screws on interpersonal communication software, lifting of libel publishing laws. Snooping and privacy stuff could go either way, my feeling is that more will happen. As it become easier to do (more computing power to people ratio) the government will see it as an easy way to monitor things. On top of that national or global government could change many of the ways in which the Internet bureaucracy works.
The interesting trend with the web over the last 10 years is that it has swung the client/server balance back to the server. Browsers have become more than just a way to read content stored somewhere else, no longer are they just distributed newspapers. There is enough in them now to make them full blown client software, the web has become a network of fat servers and thin clients. The next 10 years I think will see a swing back the other way, (I hope) not a stupid swing to fat browsers but one in which the paradigm might move towards specialist client download. Where Flash is going is a good example of how this might be achieved. Java was always there to do it but the M$ steamroller has stopped that from becoming truly universal just by making it more difficult for your punter to manage. This kind of distributed computing where the application (and/or developers) decides what is relevant to keep server side and what ought to be pushed client side to make it more efficient.
Thats more of a continuation of current trends and not a major upset. I almost think that well have another 10 years (give or take) of slowly evolving status quo and around 2010 well have another big paradigm shift. Maybe it will be something to do with grid computing, maybe the semantic web style things will suddenly become more workable. But I think possibly a major technological disruptive development will be localised AI, animal smarts computers, but ones that go beyond rule sets into learned and adaptive heuristics. That will enable a huge amount of the wishful thinking that is going on now and ease a bunch of development problems.
I thought ‘Wow’ when I first used Mosaic via a free piece of software I got from Hooked (on the net) out of their China Basin building. I was working at a San Francisco radio station (KFOG) dsabored out of my skull. A sales person there told me about a client who had called her up about the ‘Internet’ and was I interested in checking it out. I went over to Hooked’s offices and they were a classic start up ISP. Cables everywhere, racks of modems, no customer service as they struggled to just keep their system up. So, I got the software and got set up via the engineer who looked after the antennas on the Bay. He was the computer guru behind Leo Laporte who knew far too much about what was going on with the ‘net and networking. He’d introduced LAN playing of Doom a few months earlier. Leo’s got a hell of a radio voice and made mighty money off that before doing his Tech TV stuff full time. Anyway, I digress, I was in a position where I could check things out and surf around (cough, research) and show my peers, bosses, etc. what was going on out there. The Rolling Stones were doing a broadcast via a backbone was probably the highlight. But, no one really seemed to be that interested then. I showed it to a friend who concluded that it needed something a bit more ‘hip’ out there which kicked us into Buzznet/Jetpack. But, I guess the thing that really interested me then was audio and the idea that a radio station could be set up that didn’t need a broadcast license really interested me as I had radio aspirations. Real Audio’s first version coming out, Mark Cuban calling me up to market broadcast.com were some of the things that came to mind back in 1993. The global aspect was the thing that really got me going. I could keep in touch with friend in Europe and Asia without much effort at all. Things were going to get smaller and faster. While I didn’t anticipate IM and all that, I lived smaller and faster working on projects around the world with other people.
What’s going to disrupt things? I think the battle for the living room is gonna be very interesting. I also think that there’s gonna be lots more wireless use throughout the house as the wires disappear more and more. I hope someone/something disrupts the mobile/telco industry so they actually get used to the idea of making something useful for people rather than trying to be something (e.g. entertainers) that they just aren’t. Once they have this revelation I see there being some really worthwhile and useful mobile data things coming out from the otherside. It’s gonna take that long for the telcos to realise this though. I think the kids who are almost out of college/high school are gonna bring out some of the coolest stuff we’ve ever seen and we’re gonna join them on the ride ’cause it’d be stupid not to. Global news and entertainment is gonna be a given. We’ll be able to get the news and entertainment that we want from wherever to wherever we are. I think that’s really encouraging making living more remotely a more feasible thing.
Thanks for the time capsule opportunity, Matt. I hope to read this in 2013.
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