I just saw a tweet from @krusk about this Newsweek article from 1995 - “The Internet? Bah!” by Clifford Stoll. You have to read it for yourself to really enjoy it, but here’s the bit that made me giggle the hardest:
“Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just
point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network,
make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become
obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the
entire Internet handles in a month?”
The article does make some interesting points, and it’s a great way to look back and see how all of “this” was looked upon 13 years ago………..and I’m on spring break and want to spend more time reading other writers’ work than creating my own.
Oh, and to really laugh, read the comments - some readers are obviously not reading the entire headline and are responding as if this article was written today………sigh.
P.S. I’m writing this in the Blog Editor in Flock (thanks to Frank)- let’s see what happens…..
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Hehe that paragraph stuck out for me too. Also @heatherforce also pointed me to Cliff Stoll on Wikipedia, which points out that he now sells something over the Internet…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Stoll
I love these types of articles. As a writer, I’m always afraid things are write are going to be laughable in 10 years, but hey it’s the risk we take! (Actually, I’d be pretty impressed if people were talking about something I wrote 10 years ago…!)
I was a freshman in college, logging into Telnet to for the first check my email in Pine editor, reading Usenet newsgroups, and checking out the “World Wide Web” for the first time using Netscape (even then, IE was my second choice!). Of course, I had also been emailing via CompuServe and calling BBSes from my 9600 baud modem for 2.5 years by that point, so I was a little ahead of the general curve.
My floormate Lee taught me HTML in a morning, and I had my first website up by late Sept/early Oct., and my freshman seminar professor allowed me a whole class session to teach my fellow freshmen how to use the Internet - I still have the handout I made for the occasion!
Just to keep it on topic, I hope that in 13 more years (hopefully earlier) we’ll all be able to laugh at technophobia in schools as a relic from the past.
This was a hilarious article! It actually made me think back to when I got my first computer back in 1984 and it was a Commodore 64. I thought I was hot stuff back then and I remember having to write commands (before Windows). Thanks for making me see how far I’ve come from then!
Commodore 64! I had that too and had to write commands as well! In 1995, I was finishing my Master’s after taking a break having my son. I remember having a spirited discussion with a student who could not wrap his mind around the whgole idea of the Internet. Wow - look at it now!
In 1995 I was in grade 2. We didn’t have any computers in our classroom, not for a few years after that! My parents got a computer for their business a few years after that. I use to play Word rescue and Maths rescue. No internet for me… :-P
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