This clip is making the rounds of David Letterman and Bill Gates back in 1995 discussing the internet. Here is @jason discussing it. It's worth watching.
https://twitter.com/twist_tok/status/1466801869393588224
It’s easy to laugh at Letterman but in fact he was just expressing the consensus view at the time. In 1995, the best use cases that someone as smart as Gates could come up with were things you could already do with radios and tape recorders.
Of course what Gates understood was that the internet would rapidly improve and eventually unlock the internet-native experiences that we enjoy today.
The web was permissionless and programmable, which meant developers could experiment and create new classes of internet-native applications that no one in 1995 had yet imagined.
This would lead to a mutually reinforcing feedback loop between infrastructure (browsers, web servers, bandwidth, etc) and applications (search, video, social networks, etc).
https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1462452998836129793
As a result, the web evolved from read-only (web1) to read + write (web2) to the current emerging era of read + write + own (web3).
https://twitter.com/cdixon/status/1442201621266534402
One other relevant 90s story is the battle over cryptography.
It may come as a surprise that Netscape and others browsers that included 128-bit encryption were classified as “munitions” which meant it was illegal to download them outside of the US. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of…
It may come as a surprise that Netscape and others browsers that included 128-bit encryption were classified as “munitions” which meant it was illegal to download them outside of the US. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of…
The argument at the time was “Why would anyone except criminals want to use encryption? What are you trying to hide?"
The counterargument was “someday people will do most of their shopping, banking and other important activities on the internet.”
But of course at the time this simply wasn’t the case, and it required vision to imagine the world as it would exist in 10 or 20 years.
But of course at the time this simply wasn’t the case, and it required vision to imagine the world as it would exist in 10 or 20 years.
This highlights a core asymmetry in emerging computing movements.
Early on, it’s easy to point out flaws and find uninteresting use cases. Sometimes bad actors are early adopters.
It’s easy to say “you’ve invented the radio” or “you’ve invented the tape recorder.”
Early on, it’s easy to point out flaws and find uninteresting use cases. Sometimes bad actors are early adopters.
It’s easy to say “you’ve invented the radio” or “you’ve invented the tape recorder.”
It takes optimism and vision – and years of hard work by many people – to build out the infrastructure, find the native applications, and develop the technology to its full potential.
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