A few months ago the author of this article, Clifford Stoll, wrote a short, thoughtful note admitting how badly he got it wrong:<p>"Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995 howler.<p>Wrong? Yep.<p>At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.<p>Gives me pause. Most of my screwups have had limited publicity: Forgetting my lines in my 4th grade play. Misidentifying a Gilbert and Sullivan song while suddenly drafted to fill in as announcer on a classical radio station. Wasting a week hunting for planets interior to Mercury's orbit using an infrared system with a noise level so high that it couldn't possibly detect 'em. Heck - trying to dry my sneakers in a microwave oven (a quarter century later, there's still a smudge on the kitchen ceiling)<p>And, as I've laughed at others' foibles, I think back to some of my own cringeworthy contributions.<p>Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be wrong, Cliff...<p>Warm cheers to all,
-Cliff Stoll on a rainy Friday afternoon in Oakland"<p>Assuming the author really is Stoll, major props to him for admitting he got it wrong.<p>Source: <a href="http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-on.html#comment-723356" rel="nofollow">http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-on.ht...</a>
Attempting to count every incidence of rubbish he poo-poos:<p>1. telecommuting workers<p>2. interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms<p>3. electronic town meetings (Actually, not sure about this!)<p>4. virtual communities<p>5. online database [to] replace your daily newspaper<p>6. no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher<p>7. no computer network will change the way government works<p>8. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers (that was already happening...)<p>9. reading a book on disc<p>10. buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet<p>11. "Too many connectios, try again later." (The predecessor to the fail whale? I kid.)<p>12. Internet addicts clamor for government reports<p>13. pushing computers into schools<p>14. instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals<p>15. order airline tickets<p>16. make restaurant reservations<p>17. negotiate sales contracts<p>18. trustworthy way to send money over the Internet<p>19. the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople<p>The only one he actually got right: "[the internet] lures us to surrender our time on earth".
In case anyone doesn't know him, Clifford Stoll wrote "The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage", a book about his real experiences tracking down a group of computer hackers.<p>By the way, there's a bonus at the end of the book: he mentions Paul Graham (in the context of Robert Morris' worm). Was a pleasant surprise when I read the book.<p>Amazon link: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionage/dp/1416507787/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278428930&sr=8-1" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionag...</a><p>Wiki about the book: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_%28book%29" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_%28book%29</a>
I assume this was posted for folks to read and say "Look at the fool! Look how wrong he was!"<p>I find it much more interesting to find the parts in his essay that were true both then and now, for those are the parts where he stands the greatest chance of making a useful observation.<p>Reading it in this fashion, it looks as though we continue to confuse data for knowledge, images for experiences, and typing for human interaction. Not a lot of news there, but interesting nonetheless.
FWIW, though a lot of the details were wrong and changed over time, I’ve got to agree with his unhappiness about the oozing optimism of the time. A couple of examples he brought up:<p>* e-readers are still relatively new, and have not (yet) changed the publishing industry. That a screen can replace the printed page is still contested.[1] (Stoll: “At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book.” — I still hear things like this today.)<p>* The Internet has not yet revolutionized and re-democratized the government. (During the whole Google Fiber hub-bub, I heard many an optimist bring up this idea in my community.) Hell, in the United States, up to 25% of the population does not use the Internet.[2]<p>* I’m a self-driven learner but I don’t think I ever learned anything of practical application via an online course or a multimedia-driven online museum. Learning <i>information</i> is one thing, but I still think it’s hard to replicate the <i>experience</i> of in-person discourse and interaction. Just a personal observation.<p>Discounting a medium entirely is likely a poor choice since media (as in “formats for communication”) tend to last a very, very long time. All of the science fiction hopes and dreams tacked onto the medium? Not so much. These things take time, and Stoll was at least spot-on calling out things that were at best disappointing about the Internet in the 90’s.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/200491/reading_on_paper_is_faster_than_ibooks_on_the_ipad.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcworld.com/article/200491/reading_on_paper_is_fa...</a>
[2] <a href="http://www.internetworldstats.com/am/us.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.internetworldstats.com/am/us.htm</a>
I can believe that he couldn't find out the date of the Battle of Trafalgar back in 1995. I was curious to see how hard (or how easy) it is today.<p>First I went to Wolfram Alpha and entered "when was the battle of trafalgar?" The response was "21-10-1805" (plus some other information about that date).<p>Then I went to Wikipedia and entered "Battle of Trafalgar" to find the eponymous article, which begins: "The Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) was a sea battle fought between..."<p>When I Google "When was the Battle of Trafalgar?" the Wikipedia article is the top result.<p>So answering that particular question is indeed much easier today, if you know where to look.
Never mock anything technological and new. People will laugh at you for years if you get it wrong. Ask CmdrTaco.<p>The other way is not true, ask all the people who praised the Segway. Nobody cares that they thought it would be so cool.
We shouldn't be too critical, the following quote was probably true back then.<p>I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connectios, try again later."
I remember reading this article in 1995, in its context. And remember long discussion on mailing lists on this article. All these problems were real at that time. We overlooked most, because we were working to fix those. This article worked as a reminder of current situation at the time.<p>Back then I took it more as the author's expression of frustration than as prediction.
What's really amazing is how right he was about how much was wrong at the time. The thing he missed is that a lot of those problems could be solved (and many have since been). But I think he can be forgiven for that. The people who had the insight to deliver solutions to those problems are mostly very rich now.
Here's Clifford Stoll's TED talk, which is about as well organized and carefully thought out as this article:<p><a href="http://blog.ted.com/2008/03/clifford_stoll.php" rel="nofollow">http://blog.ted.com/2008/03/clifford_stoll.php</a>
Favorite line from the article:<p>"What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data,"<p>Unedited data indeed. :-)
Who else would have agreed with him at the time of writing?<p>This is gold: it reads as if it were written today to troll us. It's almost freaky how nearly all of points have manifested, and some have even forced the obsolescence of their alternatives. I haven't purchased a ticket at an airline counter in many years; I'm not even sure if it's still legal :) I feel like I'm a holdout on the newspaper, but although I buy one almost daily, I still find that I get the majority of my news from online sources. The last time I visited a library it was to charge my blackberry so I could make a call.
IMHO, the Internet revolution only began with the web around 1995. The web (http) is the marvel we see today (Facebook, Gmail, Hacker News, etc). By the end of 1994, the total number of websites was still minute compared to present standards and Netscape was only founded in 1994. If the web didn't take off, the author probably would have been right!
Though most fads are not trends and most trends are not fads, there are the occasional instances like the Internet circa 1995 that are both fads and trends. The fallacy of youth is to treat all fads as trends; the fallacy of age is to ignore all trends as fads.
I knew a few people who thought that the internet was merely a fad, right up until around 2001. After that time it was clear even to the most hardened sceptic that the internet was here to stay.
At first I was going to mock this author, but then I realized this is one of those articles that needs to be analyzed one level further than just a cursory (mocking) glance. This is something you should read and always remember when you yourself are telling someone that something is impossible.<p>I was telling a friend that streaming video games would never be possible due to the inherent latency involved, but then onlive came and proved me wrong.<p>It just goes to show you that you should always be an optimist when it comes to predicting technology.
I think people saw this in 1995 and thought “what an idiot” and I think people are doing the same thing now. But in my opinion that’s a mistake.<p>What we should be seeing is that his points were valid in 1995 and are still valid today (except for the Cyber-business one which really was pretty dumb). The internet is still an unedited mess where answers are hard to find (if they aren’t on Wikipedia), people still don’t pay attention to government based internet initiatives (outside of SF) and classrooms have computers but generally don’t use them for anything but games.<p>That’s a sad commentary on our technological advancement.<p>If people had paid attention in 1995 we might have a Semantic Web by now, we might have forced porn sites and proxies into their own domain so kids could use the internet in the classrooms, we might have forced colleges to include “interactive digital design” into their curriculum for teachers and we might have an internet based government as opposed to a government that mindlessly throws datasets up that no one pays attention to.<p>So in my opinion the last thing we should be doing is writing this piece off as silly
I would hire Clifford Stoll as a consultant - when he says "There is no future in this idea" I will put all my efforts behind it. He had 100% of his guesses wrong.
I've seen this article before and it always makes me queasy. I always get to this line "I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two." and have to go throw up.