Date: Sat, 14 Jun 1997 18:41:01 -0400 From: Joel Ray Holveck <joelh@gnu.ai.mit.edu> To: kevin_eliuk@sunshine.net Cc: jfieber@indiana.edu, msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Complaining at Warner Brothers? Message-ID: <199706142241.SAA08441@ethanol.gnu.ai.mit.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970614120853.192E-100000@kevin.sunshine.net> (message from Kevin Eliuk on Sat, 14 Jun 1997 12:21:54 -0700 (PDT))
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>Personally I believe the
>whole hype is going to go the same way as CB did in the 70's and
>Billy&Co. are going to have wasted a whole lot of man hours on making
>the Internet user (un)friendly ;)
>Or has this all been speculated before?
To quote from the Online Hacker's Jargon File, v4.0.0:
:Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!: /prov./ [Usenet] Since
{Usenet} first got off the ground in 1980--81, it has grown
exponentially, approximately doubling in size every year. On the
other hand, most people feel the {signal-to-noise ratio} of
Usenet has dropped steadily. These trends led, as far back as
mid-1983, to predictions of the imminent collapse (or death) of the
net. Ten years and numerous doublings later, enough of these
gloomy prognostications have been confounded that the phrase
"Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!" has become a running joke,
hauled out any time someone grumbles about the {S/N ratio} or
the huge and steadily increasing volume, or the possible loss of a
key node or link, or the potential for lawsuits when ignoramuses
post copyrighted material, etc., etc., etc.
Note that the original predictions were back in 1983, when the
Internet first came to be. The "net" referred to was the network of
UUCP connections, mostly nightly dialups plus the ARPANET (which
evolved into the Internet), which carried our mail and newsgroups for
some time before the @-sign became part of an email address.
I personally believe that the Internet is going to lose its current
fad-appeal in the next few years, but it will be a mainstay in
communications until the next technological revolution.
Happy hacking,
joelh
--
http://www.wp.com/piquan --- Joel Ray Holveck --- joelh@gnu.ai.mit.edu
All my opinions are my own, not the Free Software Foundation's.
Second law of programming:
Anything that can go wrong wi
sendmail: segmentation violation -- core dumped
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