Someday, computers will let me store recipes, play games and even balance my checkbook.

Not until we can create top-notch speech recognition and continue advancing in Artificial Intelligence so that a computer learns its owner's preferences and can predict what he or she will want to eat for breakfast the following day.

^ Totally. I hate it when mine makes scrambled eggs and toast when what I really wanted was pankakes.

^ Totally. I hate it when mine makes scrambled eggs and toast when what I really wanted was bukkakes.

This article doesn't sound as stupid when you realize this was written only a year after the very first www browser was deployed (mozilla 1.0)

Before the web, it was a pain in the ass to navigate the internets, plural intentional.

This article doesn't sound as stupid when you realize

dude. just this paragraph:

Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense?

every single one of those things are true. hilariously wrong.

But they were untrue then, and it was tough to see how support for that level of service could ever kick in. The local newspaper here has a website up and the police blotter section is absurdly out of date, because: who cares?

I remember going to redlobster.com, cause wtf, they had bothered to set up a web presence for some unspeakable reason. All it really had on it was a placemat you could print out and color. 13 years ago, it was almost all like that.

That seems impossible now, thank god.

I remember doing some research for a vacation, circa 93, by scouring usenets and fingering the local university where I was visiting. It was fucking long and hard to complete the task, but this information far surpassed anything I could acquire through traditional mediums. The only thing that would have trumped it was direct experience. So, I think this author was correct in the sense that their worldview about the internets was correct, as they had been fucking around for decades of DARPA and other BBs, with little evolution observed. At that stage, his experience was glacier speed evolution, but if he would have just been open to the possibility of evolution once it reached the free market.

Shit, I remember McD's first web presence, and numerous other sites that made you say 'what the fuck and why?'. One site that was far and above an immediate replacement for a local news rag was nando.net, the Raleigh News and Observer online presence. They had their shit down tight. That was the site that made me 'feel the power' and wet myself all at the same time.

Also, a shout out for Altavista. Bet the author didn't see that coming.

One really off article nets you this future:

http://www.kleinbottle.com/

Remember that Vas, in the event you ever get an invite to provide commentary on public radio, cable, etc.

Never, say never.

So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?

haha. my favorite bit.