
1995: The Internet? Bah - MykalM
http://www.newsweek.com/1995/02/26/the-internet-bah.html
======
michael_nielsen
A few months ago the author of this article, Clifford Stoll, wrote a short,
thoughtful note admitting how badly he got it wrong:

"Of my many mistakes, flubs, and howlers, few have been as public as my 1995
howler.

Wrong? Yep.

At the time, I was trying to speak against the tide of futuristic commentary
on how The Internet Will Solve Our Problems.

Gives me pause. Most of my screwups have had limited publicity: Forgetting my
lines in my 4th grade play. Misidentifying a Gilbert and Sullivan song while
suddenly drafted to fill in as announcer on a classical radio station. Wasting
a week hunting for planets interior to Mercury's orbit using an infrared
system with a noise level so high that it couldn't possibly detect 'em. Heck -
trying to dry my sneakers in a microwave oven (a quarter century later,
there's still a smudge on the kitchen ceiling)

And, as I've laughed at others' foibles, I think back to some of my own
cringeworthy contributions.

Now, whenever I think I know what's happening, I temper my thoughts: Might be
wrong, Cliff...

Warm cheers to all, -Cliff Stoll on a rainy Friday afternoon in Oakland"

Assuming the author really is Stoll, major props to him for admitting he got
it wrong.

Source: [http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-
on.ht...](http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/26/curmudgeony-essay-
on.html#comment-723356)

~~~
pavs
>major props to him for admitting he got it wrong.

Well, he really didn't have much of a choice now, did he? Nevertheless, props
to him for seeing the _funny_ side of it.

~~~
Semiapies
Actually, a lot of pundits and opinion-writers _never do_.

------
pierrefar
Attempting to count every incidence of rubbish he poo-poos:

1\. telecommuting workers

2\. interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms

3\. electronic town meetings (Actually, not sure about this!)

4\. virtual communities

5\. online database [to] replace your daily newspaper

6\. no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher

7\. no computer network will change the way government works

8\. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers (that was already
happening...)

9\. reading a book on disc

10\. buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet

11\. "Too many connectios, try again later." (The predecessor to the fail
whale? I kid.)

12\. Internet addicts clamor for government reports

13\. pushing computers into schools

14\. instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals

15\. order airline tickets

16\. make restaurant reservations

17\. negotiate sales contracts

18\. trustworthy way to send money over the Internet

19\. the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism:
salespeople

The only one he actually got right: "[the internet] lures us to surrender our
time on earth".

~~~
drtse4
He alone could have created more than 19 successful companies...

~~~
russell_h
That was what struck me about the article. He saw problem after problem with
existing technology. But rather than trying to fix the problems, he just threw
up his hands and said "this is obviously impossible".

Meanwhile, a long list of now-billionaires saw the same problems and decided
to address them.

~~~
bvi
Quick, what are all the problems with the internet today?!

~~~
erikstarck
We've been through the internet of documents (Google). Then came the internet
of people (Facebook). And the internet of places (Foursquare).

Next up is the internet of objects.

~~~
drtse4
That internet of things thing is promising, but imho no one has yet identified
which problems the people really want to solve. Ultra-cheap
wifi/sensors/little_but_not_too_much_cpu/extensible modules are yet to come,
what will happen when 4-5$ modules will be available?

~~~
erikstarck
It's simple. Every object should have a URL with its history, owners,
manufacturer, components, value etc.

A Facebook of objects. Someone should build it.

~~~
akv
Isn't that part of what the Semantic Web is supposed to be?

~~~
erikstarck
Sure, but that comment reminds me of slide 7 here:
[http://www.slideshare.net/gueste94e4c/dropbox-startup-
lesson...](http://www.slideshare.net/gueste94e4c/dropbox-startup-lessons-
learned-3836587)

------
edanm
In case anyone doesn't know him, Clifford Stoll wrote "The Cuckoo's Egg:
Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage", a book about his real
experiences tracking down a group of computer hackers.

By the way, there's a bonus at the end of the book: he mentions Paul Graham
(in the context of Robert Morris' worm). Was a pleasant surprise when I read
the book.

Amazon link: [http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-
Espionag...](http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-
Espionage/dp/1416507787/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1278428930&sr=8-1)

Wiki about the book:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo%27s_Egg_%28book%29>

~~~
erik
He also has a Klein Bottle company, with an entertaining website:

<http://www.kleinbottle.com/>

And he gave a TED talk in 2006:

<http://www.ted.com/talks/clifford_stoll_on_everything.html>

~~~
thaumaturgy
His is one of my all-time-favorite TED talks. I also happen to agree with him
on most of his points.

I currently make a reasonable living by untangling technology for people. Not
only that, but I make another person's living doing it, and soon I'll be
making yet another's, in spite of my many competitors all doing the same
thing. I think this indicates some serious shortcomings in current technology,
and a severe gap between technologists and non-technologists -- one which is
incredibly difficult to communicate to technologists.

There are two different ways to read what he wrote. One is to take it in the
way that most technologists would: when Clifford Stoll opens with, "The truth
in no online database will replace your daily newspaper", you take the word
"replace" in the most literal way possible, and say, "A-ha! But now we _do_
have online databases replacing daily newspapers, so he was wrong!"

The other way -- and the one that I think is closer to his intended meaning --
is less favorable to technologists; in this case, no online database will
"replace" our daily newspapers because online databases _won't offer the same
value_. (Not more value, nor less value, but just not the same value.)

I think this is supported by his very next statement: "...no CD-ROM can take
the place of a competent teacher..." And, again, I think he's exactly right. A
competent teacher interacts with students in ways which technology has yet to
offer.

And, some of his other statements are eerily prescient: "The Usenet, a
worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation.
Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be
heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophany
more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harrasment,
and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen." ...This happens
now, all the time, and yet I don't think it can be said that the average
internet user is actually _more informed_ about the topics on their favorite
community site.

It's a cheap form of education, at best, the nutritrional equivalent of
subsisting on a snack food and dessert diet.

"At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer
replaces the friendly pages of a book." Again, readability on electronic
devices is still a work in progress. ePaper and Amazon have made incredible
strides, but many avid readers -- those that value the experience as well as
the content -- still prefer a dead-tree book. For me, this has been something
of an eye-opener recently: I started taking dance classes with my girlfriend a
little while back, and the classes take place in a used book store. With my
busy schedule and the internet at my fingertips, I haven't been visiting the
book stores like I once did. But look! There's a great book on statistics! Oh,
and Fluid Mechanics! Oh, and a sci-fi novel! And a history book!

Browsing Amazon just doesn't get quite the same reaction as wandering through
the shelves of a good used book store. Amazon has other strengths; a local
store can't possibly have a copy of everything, so if I'm looking for a
specific title, Amazon might be a better bet. But, it doesn't completely _take
the place_ of a local store.

While he might have failed to predict the extent to which technology would
evolve and invade so many people's daily lives, I don't think he was wrong to
criticize technology's impact on those lives.

~~~
mstevens
"I think this indicates some serious shortcomings in current technology, and a
severe gap between technologists and non-technologists -- one which is
incredibly difficult to communicate to technologists."

Personally I'm very aware of this gap, but I've never yet been convinced by
the "serious shortcomings in current technology" part, except in a strictly
commercial sense. Can you expand or provide references that might convince me?

~~~
thaumaturgy
Probably not, but I don't mind trying. Most of this is based off of my
experiences with my various clients; I haven't kept anything better than
mental notes, so this is also all off the top of my head.

First, let's have a unification of user interfaces. As it stands right now,
novices find it incredibly challenging to tell when to left click, when to
right click, when to click once, and when to double-click. They can't tell the
difference between their "desktop" and their "web browser", and if you step
back and think about it for a moment, it doesn't make any sense that they
should have to.

I would also like to see the notion of everything in a computer being a
metaphor for something in real life come to a blessed end. There's no reason
that computers need to have a "desktop", and "files" and "folders" don't make
much sense to novice users. Most of them are totally incapable of organizing
their information in a useful way, and inconsistencies with file save and open
dialogs don't help this. I often hear from people who just need help finding
the file that they know they saved, but can't find on their computer. I've
also had to reconcile vast hierarchies of folders for users that had been
saving different versions of the same file to different locations.

I would like to see a new internet-distributed file system, where data is
separated into regular chunks, and then those chunks are saved in multiple
locations around the internet in a fast rootless node structure. Public chunks
are unencrypted; private chunks are encrypted. To access all of your
information from anywhere in the world, you simply sign in to a portal from
any computer; your login decrypts a small chunk file which contains encrypted
references to all the rest of your data. This would make the very idea of a
"backup" completely obsolete and would solve data portability and storage
issues for anyone with a broadband internet connection. It would also -- at
least for a while -- completely halt viruses and malware.

I want to see consumer devices become more upgradeable and more modular. At
least once a week I have to explain to a customer that their entire
motherboard (or, often, laptop) needs to be expensively replaced, because the
DC circuit failed, or a graphics chip overheated (thankyouverymuch HP).

I think there needs to be a serious effort to upgrade the communications
infrastructure in the U.S.; I'm aware of the challenges presented by the
geography in this country and current and past building practices. However,
much of this build-out has _already been paid for_ [1]. Instead, customers
find themselves having to call tech support every time they think their email
has stopped working, only to be told that their computer is currently in the
process of downloading a 10MB attachment from someone.

I believe that there needs to be a much greater importance placed on
performance in software. I think that the current commonly-accepted principles
in software development -- ship early, ship often, and hardware is cheap so
don't spend too much time making it fast or small -- is wrong-headed, and I
think that's obvious to anyone who actually interacts with their customers on
a regular basis. The fact that products like McAfee and Norton can have such
massive impacts on system performance that the customer is left wondering what
died and went to hell in their computer is a problem that needs to be
addressed.

This is just for starters. I could go on like this for a long time. I think
that all new construction should be wired up for gigabit, right alongside
phone & power; I'd like to see cars with upgradeable powerplants; etc.

It's not that I think that current technology isn't improving, or that it's
_bad_ necessarily, but I do think there are many problems that it presents
that its developers really aren't even aware of, or that they care to address.
We keep getting more and more time sinks in the form of shiny new "social"
networks where less and less of substance is shared in each iteration, while
basic principles of design and infrastructure continue to languish in the
shadows.

[1]: <http://www.newnetworks.com/BroadbandScandalIntro.htm> \-- not the very
best reference, but it's getting harder to dig this story up anymore.

------
DanielBMarkham
I assume this was posted for folks to read and say "Look at the fool! Look how
wrong he was!"

I find it much more interesting to find the parts in his essay that were true
both then and now, for those are the parts where he stands the greatest chance
of making a useful observation.

Reading it in this fashion, it looks as though we continue to confuse data for
knowledge, images for experiences, and typing for human interaction. Not a lot
of news there, but interesting nonetheless.

~~~
joezydeco
There's an old book from 1980 called "The Book of Predictions" that I used to
keep around for the same reasons.

The book is pretty much whack now, but it looks like others are in a similar
boat:

[http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/06/the-book-
of-p...](http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2008/06/the-book-of-pre.html)

------
mtigas
FWIW, though a lot of the details were wrong and changed over time, I’ve got
to agree with his unhappiness about the oozing optimism of the time. A couple
of examples he brought up:

* e-readers are still relatively new, and have not (yet) changed the publishing industry. That a screen can replace the printed page is still contested.[1] (Stoll: “At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book.” — I still hear things like this today.)

* The Internet has not yet revolutionized and re-democratized the government. (During the whole Google Fiber hub-bub, I heard many an optimist bring up this idea in my community.) Hell, in the United States, up to 25% of the population does not use the Internet.[2]

* I’m a self-driven learner but I don’t think I ever learned anything of practical application via an online course or a multimedia-driven online museum. Learning _information_ is one thing, but I still think it’s hard to replicate the _experience_ of in-person discourse and interaction. Just a personal observation.

Discounting a medium entirely is likely a poor choice since media (as in
“formats for communication”) tend to last a very, very long time. All of the
science fiction hopes and dreams tacked onto the medium? Not so much. These
things take time, and Stoll was at least spot-on calling out things that were
at best disappointing about the Internet in the 90’s.

[1]
[http://www.pcworld.com/article/200491/reading_on_paper_is_fa...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/200491/reading_on_paper_is_faster_than_ibooks_on_the_ipad.html)
[2] <http://www.internetworldstats.com/am/us.htm>

~~~
mtigas
Oh, and Prince — in the year 2010 — has no excuse for his own “the internet's
completely over” argument.

[http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7874307/Prince-
th...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7874307/Prince-the-
internets-completely-over.html)

------
troymc
I can believe that he couldn't find out the date of the Battle of Trafalgar
back in 1995. I was curious to see how hard (or how easy) it is today.

First I went to Wolfram Alpha and entered "when was the battle of trafalgar?"
The response was "21-10-1805" (plus some other information about that date).

Then I went to Wikipedia and entered "Battle of Trafalgar" to find the
eponymous article, which begins: "The Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805)
was a sea battle fought between..."

When I Google "When was the Battle of Trafalgar?" the Wikipedia article is the
top result.

So answering that particular question is indeed much easier today, if you know
where to look.

~~~
caf
This is really another on the list of technological fixes that the author
didn't forsee - search technology has improved massively since 1995. The data
was likely out there - it's just it was hard to find.

------
yread
Preivous discussions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1138707>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=143333>

------
jeb
Never mock anything technological and new. People will laugh at you for years
if you get it wrong. Ask CmdrTaco.

The other way is not true, ask all the people who praised the Segway. Nobody
cares that they thought it would be so cool.

~~~
megablast
What is so wrong with people laughing at you?

------
correct
We shouldn't be too critical, the following quote was probably true back then.

I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and
it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth
grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an
image of a London monument. None answers my question, and my search is
periodically interrupted by messages like, "Too many connectios, try again
later."

~~~
hugh3
RIght now, if you google "Date of the Battle of Trafalgar", the first hit is
wikipedia, which in google's excerpt tells you it was October 21, 1805.

The second hit is a commentary on this very article.

------
z92
I remember reading this article in 1995, in its context. And remember long
discussion on mailing lists on this article. All these problems were real at
that time. We overlooked most, because we were working to fix those. This
article worked as a reminder of current situation at the time.

Back then I took it more as the author's expression of frustration than as
prediction.

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

good times.

~~~
petervandijck
Yes, although the point somewhat stands: my local cornershop does more
business selling milk, cereal and cans than many internet startups.

~~~
sbov
Your local cornershop does more business selling milk, cereal and cans than
many non-internet non-startups. So I'm not sure how meaningful your point is.

------
rauljara
What's really amazing is how right he was about how much was wrong at the
time. The thing he missed is that a lot of those problems could be solved (and
many have since been). But I think he can be forgiven for that. The people who
had the insight to deliver solutions to those problems are mostly very rich
now.

------
isamuel
Here's Clifford Stoll's TED talk, which is about as well organized and
carefully thought out as this article:

<http://blog.ted.com/2008/03/clifford_stoll.php>

------
illumin8
Favorite line from the article:

"What the Internet hucksters won't tell you is tht the Internet is one big
ocean of unedited data,"

Unedited data indeed. :-)

~~~
kunley
It's mostly true.

The point is that you belong to an enlightened elite who already know _where_
to look for edited information.

Back in 1995 there was no Wikipedia and search engines were crap.

~~~
illumin8
I just found it ironic that an article complaining about "unedited data" also
had a spelling error that should have been caught by an editor.

------
ibejoeb
Who else would have agreed with him at the time of writing?

This is gold: it reads as if it were written today to troll us. It's almost
freaky how nearly all of points have manifested, and some have even forced the
obsolescence of their alternatives. I haven't purchased a ticket at an airline
counter in many years; I'm not even sure if it's still legal :) I feel like
I'm a holdout on the newspaper, but although I buy one almost daily, I still
find that I get the majority of my news from online sources. The last time I
visited a library it was to charge my blackberry so I could make a call.

~~~
metageek
It's probably possible to buy a ticket at the counter—though I wouldn't try
paying cash—but what's definitely extinct are paper tickets. Since about 2004,
it's all e-tickets.

------
s810
Oh the wonderful 1990s jargon. I wonder how many 'Multimedia CDROMs' today's
wikipedia would fit on.

------
poundy
IMHO, the Internet revolution only began with the web around 1995. The web
(http) is the marvel we see today (Facebook, Gmail, Hacker News, etc). By the
end of 1994, the total number of websites was still minute compared to present
standards and Netscape was only founded in 1994. If the web didn't take off,
the author probably would have been right!

------
adorton
The Internet is still a cacophony, albeit a more organized one.

~~~
hugh3
Partly, we've learned to deal with it. The tools for searching for stuff we
want have gotten better, and the amount of good content has improved, but
we've also learned not to be surprised when our searches show up completely
irrelevant junk.

------
gamble
Though most fads are not trends and most trends are not fads, there are the
occasional instances like the Internet circa 1995 that are both fads and
trends. The fallacy of youth is to treat all fads as trends; the fallacy of
age is to ignore all trends as fads.

~~~
metageek
I'm stealing that second sentence for my .sig randomizer. (With attribution.)

------
motters
I knew a few people who thought that the internet was merely a fad, right up
until around 2001. After that time it was clear even to the most hardened
sceptic that the internet was here to stay.

------
Androsynth
At first I was going to mock this author, but then I realized this is one of
those articles that needs to be analyzed one level further than just a cursory
(mocking) glance. This is something you should read and always remember when
you yourself are telling someone that something is impossible.

I was telling a friend that streaming video games would never be possible due
to the inherent latency involved, but then onlive came and proved me wrong.

It just goes to show you that you should always be an optimist when it comes
to predicting technology.

------
TomOfTTB
I think people saw this in 1995 and thought “what an idiot” and I think people
are doing the same thing now. But in my opinion that’s a mistake.

What we should be seeing is that his points were valid in 1995 and are still
valid today (except for the Cyber-business one which really was pretty dumb).
The internet is still an unedited mess where answers are hard to find (if they
aren’t on Wikipedia), people still don’t pay attention to government based
internet initiatives (outside of SF) and classrooms have computers but
generally don’t use them for anything but games.

That’s a sad commentary on our technological advancement.

If people had paid attention in 1995 we might have a Semantic Web by now, we
might have forced porn sites and proxies into their own domain so kids could
use the internet in the classrooms, we might have forced colleges to include
“interactive digital design” into their curriculum for teachers and we might
have an internet based government as opposed to a government that mindlessly
throws datasets up that no one pays attention to.

So in my opinion the last thing we should be doing is writing this piece off
as silly

~~~
kunley
Scanning thru the comments here looks like there are two of us who think most
of OP's points were and are valid.

I guess most of HN readers (including me!) are living in a comfort zone of
carefully selected sites and services, but it doesn't change the fact that
most of internet content is a pile of bullshit.

And of course, nothing can be a substitute of a human contact, and no, social
networking _is not_ a human contact.

~~~
dirtyaura
_most of internet content is a pile of bullshit_

So are the most of published books, despite the editorial work put into them.
And as the internet democratized publishing, it's just natural that there is
more crap out there. I see that as a very positive sign of true freedom of
expression.

 _social networking is not a human contact_

This is rather silly point of view. Why isn't anybody discussing how talking
in the phone "is not a human contact" ? People discuss, joke, argue, meet
their future spouses, cuddle with their current spouses, all this and more in
the internet. Of course that's not a substitute for kisses on a romantic
dinner or for a good fist-fight at the bar, but that doesn't make
communication over the internet any way less valuable.

~~~
kunley
Human contact isn't black & white, and there are tons of small important non-
verbal things not only in fist fight or romantic dinner. Actually even a
smalltalk carries lots of information of deep psychological value which is
mostly beyond words. All this is cut off when you use internet or do a phone
talk. It doesn't mean you can't use these media to do business, joke, set
things up, but dear gods, please be honest to yourself and observe how many
things are cut off and lost.

If you do it you will be able to admit that actually internet communication IS
less valuable in many ways, despite the fact how much you wouldn't want to
think like this right now.

~~~
kristiandupont
This argument only applies if you _replace_ in-person communication with
internet communication.

Most of my communication on social networks is with people that I would
otherwise not communicate with because they are too far away.I see only gain
there.

~~~
kunley
Yeah that's a gain; besides, that's what we do right now.

But! Please look around and check how many people prefer this kind of
communication with distant people when _in the same time_ they could
communicate in a more valuable way with people around them. That's what I'm
trying to condemn here.

Social networking can give a more lasting value if someone is consciously
treating it as a kind of trampoline to reach those people IRL finally. Which
is huh 0.0042% of social networking usage?

------
zebra
I would hire Clifford Stoll as a consultant - when he says "There is no future
in this idea" I will put all my efforts behind it. He had 100% of his guesses
wrong.

------
something
so, in hindsight, how many business cases are in this rant?

------
ww520
More than 640K of RAM? Bah.

------
jafl5272
Does it scare anybody just how quickly the technology has evolved to negate
many of his arguments?

------
frevd
how can I downvote that?

~~~
kunley
People always are eager to downvote an uncomfortable truth.

------
docgnome
I've seen this article before and it always makes me queasy. I always get to
this line "I've met great people and even caught a hacker or two." and have to
go throw up.

~~~
mbrubeck
I didn't realize at first that this article was written by Clifford Stoll, who
famously caught a spy/cracker working for the KGB, and wrote about it in
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoos_Egg_(book)>

~~~
docgnome
OH! Neither did I. Thanks. Now don't I look stupid. In my defense the author
isn't listed anywhere but the title tag. Which I didn't see. I've always
thought it was just written by some jerk.

