“Who would have thought that a man who seemed so able to envision the future could have so completely missed the meaning of the internet. It is not meaningless or a mere distraction; it is a tool as powerful as the printing press once was. It changes everything, and we are living at the time when it was born.”
Well, Bill Gates (who REALLY should have known better) admitted that he didn’t see it coming, either. But I’d say that at 88, Bradbury’s a bit set in his ways now. I met him once in his late 70’s, still a pretty dynamic guy.
I was on the internet, with a PC, in the early-mid 90’s; it took a good amount of money, hard technical skills and sacrificing a goat to get it work (Windows 3.1 had no TCP/IP stack out of the box, as I recall). And when I saw what it could do, I thought that it (and HTML) were the greatest inventions since fire. Too bad I didn’t capitalize on them much.
My ex was building his own computers in the mid-1970s and was online (with an intranet, and later with DARPANET) in 1978. I must have been one of the first recipients of emailed love-notes in 1978. He kept trying to get me interested and bought me my first PC in 1981. Kept emailing me from work in 1985 and telling me what errands I should run for him. This somewhat diminished my enthusiasm for the internet.
I do clearly remember him telling me, ca. 1986, that this was the future and soon the whole world would be connected.
I spent a lot of time on the net with 3.1, to download the first slackware distro.... at 14.4k
/johnny
My recollection is you needed to download something from down under, Trumpet Winsock or something like that.
I was on the internet, with a PC, in the early-mid 90’s; it took a good amount of money, hard technical skills and sacrificing a goat to get it work
Roger that...i was totally fascinated and aggravated at the same time.