...proposed

I was the main visionary. J.C.R. Licklider was another. I had vague hopes for a bandwagon effect by suggesting that there were a lot more. Doug Engelbart emphasized collaborative work on time-shared computers.

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...user.

I didn't think much about how many computers would be required. When I did, I underestimated it.

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...HREF="footnode.html#22">

2000 March 2: I did not anticipate the PC or the point-and-click way of using computers. The light pen was already available and it could have been used, but in fact I had a negative attitude towards the mouse. I also expected that the user would have more facilities for controlling the computer, e.g. to make macro operations. Point-and-click contributed to this loss of user control although it needn't have done so if text versions of the actions were kept accessible.

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...all.

The hard copy terminal would have been an electric typewriter or a teletype. I did not envisage cheap printers.

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...free.

The Government and the socially conscious have noticed the ``Internet gap'' and aim to fix it. Maybe they will succeed.

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...guys.

I think the 1970 doomsters were a little worse than the present day doomsters. Of course, some of the doomsters of that day are still active, but they have toned down a little.

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...organization.

I didn't think of the resistance to being displaced these organizations would be able to mount. The clearest examples of such resisters are the publication organizations of scientific societies which are in principle non-profit organizations.

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...proceeds.

The on-line publications do not yet think of themselves in this way.

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...interests.

All this has happened

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...material.

This hasn't really happened yet.

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...agreement.

There are various proposals, but this hasn't happened yet. One can imagine Bush and McCain ``truth squads'' putting on their candidates' web sites arguments against the positions of the other guy. Personal attacks too.

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...HREF="footnode.html#31">

2000 June 1: Today's New York Times has an article entitled ``E-Mail Messages to the Press Have Made the Gore-Bush Race a Cyberwar'' recounting how the Gore and Bush campaigns send dozens of messages per day to reporters. I suppose this is a partial realization of my 1970 prediction.

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...hours.

All this has happened.

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...prices.

This hasn't happened yet. Maybe it will.

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...schools.

All these have happened

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...more.

Minitel in France was such a service, and the promoters of set-top-boxes are trying for such limited devices. I think they'll fail, and this is shown by the fact that companies like Ford are offering their employees PCs and not set top boxes.

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...time.

Remember that those numbers represent a larger fraction of a person's income than a PC does today.

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...about.

It didn't happen that soon, because the terminals were too elaborate.

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...memory.

Plasma panels and the like are still an also-ran. The LCD panel didn't exist then.

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...messages.

The Arpanet met this specification around that time, but its use was limited to laboratories supported by DoD. It gradually expanded till it became the Internet.

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...manufacturers.

The archaic features of IBMs computers lasted much longer than I expected.

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...further.

No-one, not even IBM, imagined how much that same old magnetic disk technology could be refined-mainly by IBM. This made the laser file an also-ran. It is now much cheaper to store a single copy of a book on your disk file than on your bookshelves. You still (2000 May) can't get the books you want unless they are among the more than 11,000 books in John Mark Ockerbloom's catalog of free on-line books, which have been entered by various enthusiasts. The catalog is at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/. When I want to read such a book, I read it via Netscape rather than copy it to my own disk.

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...monopoly;

This is the situation today including Microsoft's attempt to maintain a monopoly.

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...letters;

This still hasn't happened in a uniform way. It's coming. It's coming.

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...file.

The prevalence of personal computers has accomplished the separation between ownership of hardware and the development of programs.

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...languages;

It didn't happen and isn't happening.

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...past;

In 1972 the Stanford AI Laboratory, with most of the work done by Martin Frost, built an experimental online news service based on the Associated Press news wire. We never attempted to expand it beyond the AI Lab computer. It lasted till 1989.

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...balance.

This was a particularly bad conference in the above respects, but conferences dominated by equally bad attitudes persist to the present day.

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