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

[Don Hopkins]

> On Jul 6, 2020, at 17:25, Miles Fidelman via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> 
> 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


Even longer before that, Mary Shelley wrote:

“It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.”

And a bit later, Mel Brooks wrote:

"Are you saying that I put an abnormal brain into a seven and a half foot long, fifty-four inch wide GORILLA? IS THAT WHAT YOU'RE TELLING ME?” -Dr. Frederick Frankenstein

-Don