Granted, the essay by astronomer, amateur hacker tracker and Klein-bottle maker Clifford Stoll is written in the year 1995. Still, it shows that nobody really has any idea about what the future holds.
What the Internet hucksters won’t tell you is that the Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading. Logged onto the World Wide Web, 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 connections, try again later.” ….
Lesson to be learned: while you may sound smart to complain about the problems, it’s much more fun and profitable to actually solve them. Just ask Google.
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