Cool in ‘06 – Pt 3, The Internet
It was sometime in the early 90s and and I was reading The Hacker Crackdown, this was the first time I really became aware of the Internet. I had this idea that the net would be like a complete, instantly accessible library of knowledge and I wanted access.
The reality at the web at the time was a little underwhelming. But I think we’re finally getting to the place I, and many others, imagined.
This morning for example I needed to understand the concept of marginal cost, so I looked it up on Wikipedia and found an excellent description. As I type I’m downloading an Ubuntu linux cd to do some work on a sick Windows pc, it will provide all the functionality of Windows (and more) at zero cost.
Now that’s a fairly typical (if geeky) way to spend a morning, and one I usually wouldn’t think twice about. But, giving it a little more thought, these are two awesome Internet enabled projects that were only imagined by a prescient few not so many years ago. That I can run my PC using a free, open source operating system and look up pretty much anything I can think of in a collaborative, online encyclopedia – there are pretty amazing things and it doesn’t end here.
I think, hope at least, that the next stage is for the use of incredibly powerful tool to become more widespread and really start making a difference, not just to geeks with time and curiosity, but to everyone.