It had interviews with everyone that was "important" back then (Gates & Allen (MS), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Doug Engelbart (mouse & GUIs), Tony Hoare (quicksort), Brian Kernigham, Donald Knuth, Bob Metcalfe (Ethernet), Philipe Kahn (Borland), Bob Noyce, Dennis Ritchie (C), Bjarne Stroustroup (C++), Wolfram) predicting the future.
None of them predicted the Internet.
BYTE: Let's discuss the subject of portability. Do you think we'll have notebook computers or pocket computers? How do you think the size will evolve?
Gordon Bell: The computer will disappear by another 10 years in [its present form]. There will be zero-cost notebook-size computers with one chip in them that will have about 32 megabytes. So people will be carrying around these sort of minicellular, really connected, computers that go into their own databases somewhere.
Doug Engelbart: Everyone’s going to have a computer-carried around, or surgically implanted, or sitting on your hat or your spectacles or what-and they’re all going to be connected into networks just totally, [and] those networks will be wireless.
BYTE: This sounds more like a portable office than a portable computer. Do you really think cellular phones and faxes will enter the notebook arena?
Bill Gates: That's a little radical. I don't think it's necessary. If you can connect up every few hours, that's good enough. The machine in the office will just have this optic fiber that will go off to the world net work out there. It will directly connect to some kind of server and will have a lot of storage.
Fortunately for Microsoft, he eventually did get it, though only just in time -- not long after the book hit the shelves.
If continuous connectivity was unavailable, I could imagine an somewhat different ecosystem developing. We could still have sexy phone/PDA devices, but with software optimized around caching and making use of a transient connection.
For example, "feed" based apps like HN/Reddit/any typical news sources tend to pull the latest feed when you open the app, then load individual articles on request. In a limited-connectivity world, you'd see the app sitting in the background, waiting for Wi-Fi or a sync cable or however it was hooked in, and then pulling as many articles as it could to a local cache, so you could read them completely without data later.
I'm actually surprised this didn't happen much more in countries where data was spotty or expensive and limited.
Lotus founder Mitch Kapor and several industry colleagues have formed an organization they say will fight to ensure the Bill of Rights covers computer-based communication and electronic information. The purpose of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (California, MA), is to combat violations of civil liberties, Kapor says, as well as educate government policymakers, law enforcement agencies, and the public about computers.
The EFF has taken heat from some members of the industry because they see it as simply a "hacker defense fund," and some law enforcement officials are not necessarily in favor of it. "It's as if NOW started a foundation to come to the assistance of [people charged in] rape cases," says Don Ingraham, chief of the high-tech crime team and an assistant district attorney for Alameda County in northern California. "We don't know what to think of it." He says he doesn't understand why the computer industry would defend people trying to break into their systems.
We were already calling it the internet when I started college in 88 and after all, it ran on TCP/IP(the latter stands for Internet Protocol) which ARPANET adopted in 1983.
I mean the whole social, cultural and economic impact and, yes, the web is a very important part of it.
But there were a few more things in that early era, besides the web (e.g.:ICQ, IRC, Napster).
By anywhere else, do you mean _near you_? In a word, Frys. hahah