I asked earlier in the week after any results from last year’s rounds of predictions. Haven’t found too many yet, but Jason Kottke caught this great page, and I had to share it. I laughed pretty hard at a few things. Some were prescient. Some are still being repeated today. Some are just quaint.

It’s from an on-line survey taken at the end of 1994 for the Best and Worst of that year, as well as predictions for the year to come. Times were different a decade ago. The ‘net was still a fairly exclusive place. The web was just being born. USENET was king. I was a newbie. (Started college in September 1994, and eagerly jumped on the ‘net as quickly as I could.)

Click through for the whole thing, but here are some highlights I enjoyed, with my comments italicized afterwards:

Best of 1994:

• Best song: “Ballad of Om and TYG” (Tom, I know you’re out there. Dare I ask what this one was all about? It’s from Mike Godwin’s Best/Worst list. To everyone else: Yes, Mike’s the guy who coined Godwin’s Law.)
• The critical-mass factor. The number of people now reachable via e-mail on the Internet has grown so large that anyone who isn’t connected knows they’re missing a good thing. Before, I had to argue with people about whether or not to join a public e-mail system. Now people take an Internet e-mail address for granted. This was the year that just about everyone finally realized they had to get wired to stay competitive. The Internet isn’t just for nerds anymore. (Remember, this was the end of 1994.)

Worst of 1994:

• Media hysteria about e-mail stalking and the threat to children on the Internet (Dateline NBC hadn’t even started yet. Nothing has changed here.)
• Worst e-mail received: “Found your name on Gopher. How do I read files?” Yes, this is a true story, and yes, it was an AOL user. (I love me some AOL bashing.)
• The amount of WWW and Gopher data traversing the backbone means that poor little folks who want to do something as backwards as telnet are out of luck: The arteries of the Internet are clogged with the cholesterol from the information equivalent of a burger, fries, and shake. I know the Internet isn’t just for research anymore, but do you suppose copying megabytes of GIFs of weather maps or naked girls could be done during non-prime time? This was the year that Internet traffic truly exceeded capacity. (I wonder what he’d think about podcasting?)
• The organization of the World-Wide Web. I love the Web, but finding something specific on it is a nightmare. And because the Web is growing by leaps and bounds, I just don’t see things getting easier anytime soon. (Don’t worry, Yahoo’s directory is not that far away, 1994! And getting your own web page included in it should only be a six month wait, if you’re lucky. DMoz.org will bring open source to the concept, and AltaVista will prove that keyword search is better than directory structures.)

Predictions for 1995:

• Conflicts between local and global Internet jurisdictions will become more pronounced, especially over censorship issues. How will prosecutors in Tennessee go after posters from Denmark? (Forget censorship; it’s all about digital rights management now, baby.)
• I have one word for you: connectivity. As the nation unifies into a blob-like Web addict, the roar for faster connectivity will grow deafening. “An ISDN in every wall outlet, and a chicken in every pot!” to quote the precocious William Jennings Bryant. (Today we have towns setting up “free” wi-fi throughout their jurisdictions. And $100 laptops for Africa.)
• Smart searches. The first intelligent agent software packages will emerge, allowing Net users to ask for a specific piece of information like “What is the population of Fiji?” or “How far is Saturn from the Sun?” An agent will go out on the Net , find the information, and return it without the user knowing the source. (We all take Google, et. al. for granted today, don’t we?)

This entry was posted on Friday, January 5th, 2007 at 8:51 am and is filed under Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.