And we’re already midway through January! It’s amazing how quickly time can go by sometimes. It feels like we only just started 2007 and we’re already a couple of weeks in. Arthur is almost 1 (his birthday is on the 18th) and I still haven’t managed to get his blog underway yet. So much to do, and so little time huh?
2007 started with a number of predictions and resolutions but the most interesting snippet was sent to my by Sherrilynne. It’s a post about the worst and best of 1994 and predictions for 1995! My favourite are the following:
Best
- TCP/IP for free for everyone. Both Apple and Microsoft announced that in the next major release of their operating systems, TCP/IP will be built-in and ready to rock-and-roll. Now the only major holdouts are Digital’s OpenVMS and IBM’s VM. Are you listening?
Worst
- All data are Mosaic. What is it about the World-Wide Web that makes everyone want to stick 100-K pictures on their home pages? Add that to the incredible inefficiencies and poor designs of the Gopher and HTTP (WWW) protocols and we see another generation of computing resources torpedoed by the enthusiasm and poor programming of graduate students. The amount of WWW and Gopher data traversing the backbone means that poor little folks who want to do something as backwards as telnet are out of luck: The arteries of the Internet are clogged with the cholesterol from the information equivalent of a burger, fries, and shake. I know the Internet isn’t just for research anymore, but do you suppose copying megabytes of GIFs of weather maps or naked girls could be done during non-prime time? This was the year that Internet traffic truly exceeded capacity.
Prediction
- Smart searches. The first intelligent agent software packages will emerge, allowing Net users to ask for a specific piece of information like “What is the population of Fiji?” or “How far is Saturn from the Sun?” An agent will go out on the Net , find the information, and return it without the user knowing the source.
Ah .. don’t you just wish you had a time machine so you could go back and enjoy the
deliciously misguided past …
Still .. I’m sure people will be looking back in 15 years time and making fun of some of our predictions.