[ih] Internet-history Digest, Vol 10, Issue 1

[Miles Fidelman]

On 7/6/20 10:52 AM, John Gilmore via Internet-history wrote:

>> I answered him that thirty years of the internet has been a spectacular
>> time of development. Can you imagine the word fighting the COVID-19
>> pandemic without the internet? If there were no internet, there could be
>> very little working from home, no online classes for students stuck at
>> home, no video communication with family and friends, much more loneliness,
> In 1992 John Perry Barlow called for "connecting every mind to every
> other mind in full-duplex broadband. ... The creation of ... a
> ubiquitous digital web, [for] ... telephone service, e-mail, software,
> faxes, ... 'video postcards', and, in time, High Definition Television
> as well as other media as yet barely imagined."  He called it The Great
> Work.

Long before that, Licklider wrote:

"The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing 
machines will be coupled together very tightly, and that the resulting 
partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process 
data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we 
know today."  (In "Man-Computer Symbiosis," 1960, 
https://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html)

And, of course, he's the one who wrote the famous "MEMORANDUM FOR: 
Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network," in 1963 
(https://www.kurzweilai.net/memorandum-for-members-and-affiliates-of-the-intergalactic-computer-network).

Miles Fidelman



-- 
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.  .... Yogi Berra

Theory is when you know everything but nothing works.
Practice is when everything works but no one knows why.
In our lab, theory and practice are combined:
nothing works and no one knows why.  ... unknown