It is often said that people cannot predict future technology, even a few decades in advance. Some people cannot, but others can. Here is something Arthur Clarke wrote in 1972. He and others predicted the Internet and many of its ramifications.
. . . It will be a future in which men do much less commuting and more communicating. Even today, probably 90 percent of the average executive's business could be performed without leaving home, by the use of equipment which is already available on an experimental basis. During the next decade, we will see the evolution of a general-purpose, home-communications console providing two-way vision, hard-copy readout so that diagrams and printed material can be exchanged, and a keyboard to allow "conversation" with the computers and information banks upon which our world will increasingly depend. Before we consider its practicability, let us see what we could do with such a device. Far more than business discussions and conferences would be possible; the housewife could go shopping by dialing the catalogue of her favorite stores; scholars and students would have instant access to any book or periodical stored in the global electronic library; this minute's news, continually updated, would be displayed in printed headlines, and any selected item could be expanded as desired, according to taste. This, incidentally, raises the possibility of something quite new -- the "personalized" electronic news service, tailored to the interests of the individual subscriber! Today, such a receiving console would cost tens of thousands of dollars-and would be useless, because the communications network to service it does not yet exist. But this network will be built up during the next decades; one of the great enterprises of the twentieth century will be the establishment, with the help of satellites, of a planetary "information grid." It will join the other networks we have developed during the last hundred and fifty years, and which we now take so much for granted that we forget their existence, except when they break down. Chronologically, they are: water, sewerage, gas, electricity, telephone -- and now cable TV, or video. The forthcoming information grid will absorb the last two. . . . - Jed
