By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 1999, The Syracuse Newspapers
Nobody saw it coming.
I read Nicholas Negroponte's important book, "Being Digital," on a lazy vacation day last month and realized two-thirds of the way through that he hadn't seen what was about to happen. "Being Digital" was written in late 1994 and published in 1995. Negroponte, the man who foresaw mice and windows and blazing graphics 20 years ago, never mentioned the word "Web" in his entire book. To him, the Internet was e-mail.
That was the same time that Bill Gates got Microsoft to crank out a new version of Windows, a modern version, full of modern features. But Bill Gates, who claims to see much further ahead than the rest of us, didn't see it coming either. Windows 95 treated the World Wide Web as if it were some sort of sideshow. When you turned on a Windows 95 PC, you couldn't even connect to the Internet. You had to add stuff to Windows to do that.
You'd think that somebody must have known it was coming. Maybe the guy who invented the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, saw what was going to happen. But I doubt it. I think he just had a nagging feeling that computers that could log onto each other and share documents would make life easier for people who were doing research. Nothing that Berners-Lee has written indicates that he has superhuman powers to see into the future. He just did the right thing at the right time, and the best thing he did has nothing to do with computers. He refused to give up when other people laughed at him.
So the Web was a surprise. Negroponte mentions Mosaic, the first Web browser, the one that turned into Netscape, in a passing remark. He spends a lot of time writing about MUDs -- multi-user dungeons, which were popular role-playing games on the early Internet -- as if they represented the entertainment of the future. He mentions Mosaic is though it were a way to do what e-mail did a lot better -- share some data.
Yes, the Web was a surprise. Fire must have been a surprise, too. And glaciers. You could rank them that way in importance. Fire and ice and the Web.
I think the World Wide Web hit us unawares because it wasn't a government project or a corporate advertising theme. We weren't asked to divvy up a little more in our tax bills to pay for the Web. Nobody saw jingles on TV about it. Nobody brought in bulldozers to clear a path for the Web.
It just happened. The Web succeeded because it wasn't hardware. It was just software. The hardware was already there. DARPA (the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) had made sure that the country had a lanky, impossible-to-crash network in case atomic bombs fell on us. It became the Arpanet (Advanced Research Projects Agency network).
And that became the Internet. It had lots of wires and cables and computers. It was hardware, things you could touch, things somebody had to take care of, things somebody had to pay for.
But the Web was just software. You ran a program on one computer and a program on another computer and that made the Web, once you did the same thing on a lot of computers. When people laughed at Tim Berners-Lee in the early 1990s, there were maybe 40 computers that talked to each other that way. The first thing you could browse on the Web was a phone book.
There are maybe 500 million computers that talk to each other that way now. And you can still call up a phone book if you want. It seems fitting. The first thing anyone thought of when playing with a new invention, one that no one could have foreseen, was a list of names and numbers based on the old technology.
Some day that will all change. The Web won't be a phenomenon any more than the telephone is. Or any more than fire is, or ice is. And this era will be just like those others, part of pre-history.
Our children's children's children will ask about a time when the Web was still something you needed to log onto, something that wasn't built into radios and telephones and remote controls and cars, and the answers they get will start out the same way: A long time ago, the world changed. It changed all of a sudden, and nobody saw it coming.
technofile:
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