Why did no one foresee the Internet?

Probably the same reason countless other things weren’t foreseen.

William Gibson and cyberspace? Neuromancer?

Perhaps, but the Internet is the big one, the biggest cultural transformation since the invention of the printing press. We knew about computers and telecommunications, why were we so blind to what now seems an obvious and inevitable development.

@mrentropy I haven’t read the book but you are right I think cyberspace did bear some resemblance to the Internet, but the book was written in 1984 when the Internet did actually exist though in a very small scale.

At least when personal nano-robots under your skin and in your blood become common you can’t say that Raquel Welch wasn’t on top of it.

@flutherother It did not exist the way we know it today. And very few people really knew about it (relatively speaking). Gibson’s “cyberspace” is actually way cooler than the Internet is now. His was all about going into a virtual reality in a way more like The Matrix.

In 1984 the Domain Name System went live. AOL didn’t exist yet (1989). GEnie didn’t exist yet (1985).

In 1984 if you wanted to “jack into Cyberspace” that meant using your modem to dial into CompuServe or manage to hook into Plato. Both of these (actually, I think there’s another early service that I’m forgetting about) may have served as a kind of inspiration for Gibson, though. Maybe.

@mrentropy That’s another book I’m going to have to get from the local library. Gibson’s imagination did foresee the Internet and beyond the Internet but when the Internet was just around the corner so to speak no one really imagined in practical terms how it would change society. There was no planning, it has all just happened. I find this a little surprising and disconcerting.

@flutherother That’s a whole other kettle of fish. With absolutely no data whatsoever I’m going to go ahead and blame AOL, CompuServe and GEnie for that. And Prodigy. They were the ones that brought the Internet to the masses, literally working as “gateways.”

i wish Margaret Thatcher had foreseen the potential, i mean war games the movie hinted at it, before she privatised our telecommunication system.

Scott Card foresaw the internet as we know it, describing in in 1985 in the famous “Ender’s Game,” which is now being taught in schools as literature. When I first read it, probably not long after it was published, it was just science fiction.

TCP/IP, as @mrentropy says, started worldwide in 1985. But it didn’t really start to project its potential unil a few years later, I think. I got up on the www before Windows 95 came along. I don’t remember exactly when, but I do remember having to do all kinds of tricks to get on the WWW. Before that, Fidonet brought me the connections from around the world, and before that, the university net, although I didn’t use that hardly at all. It seemed like a game then.

But because of what I had read, I knew that the internet was coming, and I knew second life was coming (which is based on fictional depictions in various stories, I think), and we know that not too long from now, we are going to have a gadget the size of a hearing aid attached to our ear, and it will bring us everything a phone does, and probably more. We may have to wear glasses that it will project images on, and we might have special mounts for cameras (I don’t think we want them on our ears), and we’ll interface with these things by body motions or thoughts. No more input devices like keyboards and pointing devices, or pads.

Computers may also be built into our clothing at some point. Data capturing devices, too. I think our futurists are on top of things. It’s us who might not be on top of the futurists.

@wundayatta There is no end of speculation by futurists and others on what might be but they are almost never right. If they are right it is because if you fire enough shotgun pellets in the general direction of a target some will hit the bullseye. What is notable about science fiction and predictions is how quickly they date and nearly all science fiction is deeply embedded in the present and not the future. Computers in our clothing is going to seem so 2010. If history teaches us anything it is that the future is entirely unpredictable.

There were many stories that contained descriptions that would fit the internet of today. I’m sure with enough research on the internet, you could find a list of them. I would start with a search for internet predicted

Off track just a bit….We were at auction last week, and I found a book written by Bill Gates back in 1995. In it he’s predicting the future of the internet. :) Haven’t read it yet, but it should be pretty interesting!

@flutherother “If history teaches us anything it is that the future is entirely unpredictable.”
Errr, why’d ya ask then?

@wundayatta Minor correction: TCP/IP was around slightly before 1985, somewhere around 1983. It took them two years to get tired of writing out IP addresses, I guess.

@YARNLADY As I was rooting around for dates on GEnie, et al, I came across a small thing that said George Orwell had a small bit in “1984” that seemed kind of Internet-ish, but he took it out.

And… @flutherother Science-Fiction does get dated, but you have to remember that people are kind of stuck in the pond that they grew up in. It’s really hard to envision something from the future without using what you’re used to. Such as the “data cards” in Star Trek. Back in the 1960s, plastic was in so that’s what they looked like, flat pieces of plastic. But then, maybe it only looks “dated” because we can do the same thing now with RFID tags if we really wanted to.

I did, but my website got wiped out during the great “change from backslash to forward slash” movement. Sigh. You could have read about it on http:\\predictions.com. (Don’t worry, the site you’ll be redirected to seems harmless, and it’s not mine.)

I also had one of the first email addresses in Michigan… and no one to correspond with. (My first email received was spam.) And so it goes.

It was foreseen. I read a science fiction book some time before the Internet in which people were plugged into the Net with an implant in their heads.

I know I know, this is a far stretch, but you know that I really believe it…

Jesus predicted the Internet. uh hu… that’s right boys and girls

Follow along the logic crumbs and see if you can’t at least see where I’m coming from on this… I’m serious!

He said over and over again that his return would be upon the “Clouds of Heaven”...

And… by now you all know that I believe Jesus Christ is the embodiment of Truth… right?

stay with me here

OK if you’ve gotten this far, then you must also know that I believe Cloud Computing is the very same concept as The Clouds of Heaven. And on 12/21/12 (maps to ABBAAB – reads backwards in Hebrew as BA ABBA – meaning Father Returns) that more Information (God) will be in the Information Cloud than anywhere else in the universe.

Upon that day, we will no longer be able to lie to one another. This marks the reign of Truth, the Second coming of Christ.

We are literally building the horse that Jesus will ride in on… metaphorically of course.

And we can also groove to “Dancing Queen” since ABBA will be there.

Online dating from the late 1800’s.
I’m not seeing how this is appreciably different from Amazon and UPS…

In his 1938 novel, For Us The Living, Robert A. Heinlein predicts a nationwide information network, from which the hero is able to instantly access a newspaper article from the previous century, from at home.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies That was fucking cool. Mind = blown.

Makes sense to me @Fred931. We can see it happening right before our very eyes. We’re almost there now. Not only can we immediately check any claim against a Google search, but there are cameras freaking everywhere watching every move we make. It’s getting harder and harder to lie to one another. This trend will continue and magnify exponentially.

And now, in The Age of The Petabyte, the Scientific Method is becoming obsolete. We no longer must seek truth out by way of methodology. Truth, Absolute Truth, is beginning to speak for itself.

The same reason why no one foresaw quantum indeterminacy. Nature is a complex system. We can’t predict the weather in New York City on December 25, 2061. Human society and human thinking is also a complex system. The Internet by the way was a planned effort to avoid total nuclear annihilation. But the world wide web was an accident. Because a British physicists in Switzerland wanted to make the lives of his fellow scientists a little easier. Then an American innovator saw the potential and created the Mosaic browser. Both inventions changed the world completely.

We have no control over the weather or the ultimate nature of reality but you would think we would have more foresight regarding our own future.

Back in the 1970’s when we had electronic data storage and telecommunications it surprises me that no one imagined the power of putting the two together and thereby transforming the world. No one considered this even theoretically and it was left to happen by chance.

I used the example of the Internet as it is the most glaring example but generally speaking though people spend a lot of time imagining the future we are very bad at doing it and almost invariably get it wrong. I am curious as to why this should be.

I think it’s because, as a species, we’re very “last minute.”

I did; I just didn’t tell anyone…lol!

It didn’t. Bill Gates was dreaming of it since he was in HS in the early 70’s. Prior to that, just dreaming of a workable, reasonable computer took up everyone’s time.

I’m in the process of reading his book, “The Road Ahead,” written in 1995 about his predictions for the internet, which was just starting to blossom. He’s calling it The Information Highway.