A big theme of the Last Day Good on the Internet is that predictions about advance technology are a fools game. We rarely know when we are living through an acceleration of the future. And even when we are confronted with new tools like the internet, we instinctively speak the language of magic or mockery. Before we travel back to the birth of the commercial interent in the late 1990’s, let’s go a little further back in time to this wonderful interview with Arthur C. Clarke from 1964 about the perils of future gazing
Try as we can, concluded Clarke, we will never outguess the future. But that warning didn’t stop journalists doing their damndest to outguess the future of the internet, just as it readied itself to become part of everyday human life.
If you have a little time, this report about Bill Gates preparing an internet rocket ship is pretty compelling, mainly for its intimate portrayal of what big tech looked like before it was big tech.
As I write in my book, the internet became a commercial force in a matter of weeks at the end of the summer of 1995. But even as it became mainstream, it became the source of proud bemusement, as TV anchors asked “what is internet?” and struggled to fill the resulting silence.
The single best televised collision between past and future is this interview between David Letterman and Bill Gates in 1995. I think the past wins this encounter (at about 3 minutes in!)
By 1998, the “internet was the future of business”, as this advert proclaimed. If you insert the letters “AI” you might be listening to almost every senior business executive alive today.