From: Michael S. Lorrey (mlorrey@datamann.com)
Date: Thu Dec 07 2000 - 09:16:16 MST
"Michael M. Butler" wrote:
>
> And then there's all the people who got into computers because of Ted
> Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines. I was trying to get the Xanadu
> insiders tuned into this weird "SGML" stuff back in '87.
>
> Of course, the later catchphrase from Ted is that the Web was what we
> were trying to _prevent_, and to some extent he's right--but that's
> another story. :)
There seemed to be a dualism at work. Many career university types were
committed to preventing any sort of 'commercialization' of the internet,
naively thinking that the internet would maintain a high signal to noise
ratio no matter how many people were on it through self governance, and
that it would make more people better thinkers and more intelligent as a
result. We can of course now laugh at such naivete. On the other hand,
you had military contractor types on the net who saw the commercial
potential but could do nothing while DARPA was paying the bills and the
university 'pinheads' dominated the traffic (and who were a linchpin in
the R&D of their own businesses). As more industry engineering types got
on the net, things shifted to a more right libertarian gestalt until
eventually those two lawyers committed the first act of commercial spam,
and all hell broke loose.
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