[ih] History of the Economics of the Internet?

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

in furtherance of "Lick's vision was broad and deep, envisioning a
future "intergalactic network" where computers were somehow able to
communicate with each other to help humans do everything humans do -
like communicating by email."

of note, there is/was the late Mark Weiser's vision of "Ubiquitous
Computing" whereby
EXCERPTing from Mark Weiser's article, "The Computer for the Twenty-First
Century," Scientific American, pp. 94-10, September 1991 [link below]:

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave
themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are
indistinguishable from it.

Consider writing, perhaps the first information technology: The ability to
capture a symbolic representation of spoken language for long-term storage
freed information from the limits of individual memory. Today this
technology is ubiquitous in industrialized countries. Not only do books,
magazines and newspapers convey written information, but so do street
signs, billboards, shop signs and even graffiti. Candy wrappers are covered
in writing. The constant background presence of these products of "literacy
technology" does not require active attention, but the information to be
conveyed is ready for use at a glance. It is difficult to imagine modern
life otherwise.

Silicon-based information technology, in contrast, is far from having
become part of the environment. More than 50 million personal computers
have been sold, and nonetheless the computer remains largely in a world of
its own. It is approachable only through complex jargon that has nothing to
do with the tasks for which which people actually use computers. The state
of the art is perhaps analogous to the period when scribes had to know as
much about making ink or baking clay as they did about writing.

The arcane aura that surrounds personal computers is not just a "user
interface" problem. My colleagues and I at PARC think that the idea of a
"personal" computer itself is misplaced, and that the vision of laptop
machines, dynabooks and "knowledge navigators" is only a transitional step
toward achieving the real potential of information technology. Such
machines cannot truly make computing an integral, invisible part of the way
people live their lives. Therefore we are trying to conceive a new way of
thinking about computers in the world, one that takes into account the
natural human environment and allows the computers themselves to vanish
into the background.

Such a disappearance is a fundamental consequence not of technology, but of
human psychology. Whenever people learn something sufficiently well, they
cease to be aware of it. When you look at a street sign, for example, you
absorb its information without consciously performing the act of reading..
Computer scientist, economist, and Nobelist Herb Simon calls this
phenomenon "compiling"; philosopher Michael Polanyi calls it the "tacit
dimension"; psychologist TK Gibson calls it "visual invariants";
philosophers Georg Gadamer and Martin Heidegger call it "the horizon" and
the "ready-to-hand", John Seely Brown at PARC calls it the "periphery". All
say, in essence, that only when things disappear in this way are we freed
to use them without thinking and so to focus beyond them on new goals.

The idea of integrating computers seamlessly into the world at large runs
counter to a number of present-day trends. "Ubiquitous computing" in this
context does not just mean computers that can be carried to the beach,
jungle or airport. Even the most powerful notebook computer, with access to
a worldwide information network, still focuses attention on a single box.
By analogy to writing, carrying a super-laptop is like owning just one very
important book. Customizing this book, even writing millions of other
books, does not begin to capture the real power of literacy.

Furthermore, although ubiquitous computers may employ sound and video in
addition to text and graphics, that does not make them "multimedia
computers." Today's multimedia machine makes the computer screen into a
demanding focus of attention rather than allowing it to fade into the
background.

Perhaps most diametrically opposed to our vision is the notion of "virtual
reality," which attempts to make a world inside the computer. Users don
special goggles that project an artificial scene on their eyes; they wear
gloves or even body suits that sense their motions and gestures so that
they can move about and manipulate virtual objects. Although it may have
its purpose in allowing people to explore realms otherwise inaccessible --
the insides of cells, the surfaces of distant planets, the information web
of complex databases -- virtual reality is only a map, not a territory. It
excludes desks, offices, other people not wearing goggles and body suits,
weather, grass, trees, walks, chance encounters and in general the infinite
richness of the universe. Virtual reality focuses an enormous apparatus on
simulating the world rather than on invisibly enhancing the world that
already exists.

Indeed, the opposition between the notion of virtual reality and
ubiquitous, invisible computing is so strong that some of us use the term
"embodied virtuality" to refer to the process of drawing computers out of
their electronic shells. The "virtuality" of computer-readable data -- all
the different ways in which it can be altered, processed and analyzed -- is
brought into the physical world.

How do technologies disappear into the background? The vanishing of
electric motors may serve as an instructive example: At the turn of the
century, a typical workshop or factory contained a single engine that drove
dozens or hundreds of different machines through a system of shafts and
pulleys. Cheap, small, efficient electric motors made it possible first to
give each machine or tool its own source of motive force, then to put many
motors into a single machine..."


https://web.archive.org/web/20180624201034/http://www.ubiq.com/weiser/
*https://web.archive.org/web/20180602090007/http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html
<https://web.archive.org/web/20180602090007/http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiHome.html>*

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/512616/how-smart-watches-and-phablets-fulfill-a-20-year-old-prophecy-about-ubiquitous-computing/
Papers

Other writeups by Weiser on different aspects of Ubicomp can be found in
the following references:

   - Mark Weiser. "The world is not a desktop
   <https://web.archive.org/web/20180602072606/http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/ACMInteractions2.html>
   ". *Interactions*; January 1994; pp. 7-8.
   - Mark Weiser, "Hot Topics: Ubiquitous Computing
   <https://web.archive.org/web/20180602102125/http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiCompHotTopics.html>
   " *IEEE Computer*, October 1993.
   - Mark Weiser, "Some Computer Science Problems in Ubiquitous Computing
   <https://web.archive.org/web/20180329233244/http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/UbiCACM.html>
   ," *Communications of the ACM,* July 1993. (reprinted as "Ubiquitous
   Computing". *Nikkei Electronics*; December 6, 1993; pp. 137-143.)
   - *Mark Weiser, "The Computer for the Twenty-First Century
   <https://web.archive.org/web/20180602101331/http://www.ubiq.com/hypertext/weiser/SciAmDraft3.html>,"
Scientific
   American, pp. 94-10, September 1991*


On Tue, Jul 28, 2026 at 9:48 PM Jack Haverty via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Sorry, it's just something I remember.  No references that I know
> about.  The 1970s were a time when email was the new toy and it was used
> for everything that used to be done by letters or journal and conference
> papers.  Most of that early 1970s email has probably not survived (I
> have none of mine), except for some popular mailing lists of the era
> such as HEADER-PEOPLE.
>
> As I recall, most of the debate was between Lick and whoever was at ARPA
> in the early 1970s.   Lick's vision was broad and deep, envisioning a
> future "intergalactic network" where computers were somehow able to
> communicate with each other to help humans do everything humans do -
> like communicating by email.
>
> In contrast, ARPA was understandably focussed on the new ARPANET they
> had just built.   At the time, users of the ARPANET were restricted to
> people who were working on some ARPA project.  That restriction provided
> a form of backpressure to prevent widespread spam.   So other mechanisms
> such as "stamps" were deemed unnecessary.  Backpressure dosn't have to
> be monetary.
>
> Lick's vision was anticipating the rise of The Internet where spam has
> become a real issue.   ARPA had a much shorter vision which didn't need
> such mechanisms.
>
> Some economic issues were introduced when NSF entered the Internet
> project later in the 1980s.  NSF funded startup ISPs, but explicitly
> made it clear that each had to become self-sufficient in a short time
> (perhaps 2 years?  I forget...)
>
> While I was later doing Internet projects at BBN in the 1980s, I asked
> one of the people reporting to me (Cyndi Mills) to start up a research
> topic (may have been an IETF working group?) focussed on Accounting for
> the Internet.   If we could gather data about usage of the Internet,
> that would be a precursor to introducing some kind of payments for
> usage.  That effort didn't get much interest either.
>
> I guess there weren't enough economists in the research community.  I
> wasn't an economist, but I did take several undergraduate courses in
> Economics so I at least knew the basics.
>
> /Jack Haverty
>
> On 7/28/26 17:24, Dave Crocker wrote:
> > On 7/28/2026 1:39 PM, Jack Haverty via Internet-history wrote:
> >> We actually tried to introduce the notion of "stamps" to the
> >> develolping email standards in the 1970s to provide a form of
> >> negative feedback.
> >
> >
> > I don't recall this.  Especially since the first (and I believe only)
> > spam in the 1970s, was the DEC one in 1978.
> >
> > Can you provide any details (or even better a citation)?
> >
> > As for schemes to try to prevent or counter email abuse, there have
> > been enough over the years to prompt Cory Doctorow, many years ago, to
> > create a template for responding to such proposals.  I think it was
> > intended for humor, but he did such a good job, some of us have used
> > it seriously:
> >
> >     http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
> >
> > d/
> >
> > --
> > Dave Crocker
> >
> > dhc at dcrocker.net
> > bluesky: @dcrocker.bsky.social
> > mast: @dcrocker at mastodon.social
> > +1.408.329.0791
> >
> > Volunteer, Silicon Valley Chapter
> > Northern California Coastal Region
> > Information & Planning Coordinator
> > American Red Cross
> > dave.crocker2 at redcross.org
>
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>
>

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True