An interesting thought occurred to me as I was sifting through many, many back issues of Whole Earth and Co-Evaluation. As I looked at the pages and pages of inventions, books, and ideas, listed along with reviews, and sifted from the millions of products which must have been available, I noticed that the format of these magazines from the 70s and 80s were oddly familiar. They we not unlike the modern internet, in paper form. Simple users reviews and links to further information or the manufacturer or publisher, very personal, organized into broad categories, and interspersed with articles and occasionally comics. Stewart Brand had fairly accurately foretold aspects of the modern internet way back in 1972, in an article about Spacewar he published in Rolling Stone. “One popular new feature on the Net is AI's Associated Press service. From anywhere on the Net you can log in and get the news that's coming live over the wire or ask for all the items on a particular subject that have come in during the last 24 hours. Plus a fortune cookie. Project that to household terminals, and so much for newspapers (in present form). Since huge quantities of information can be computer-digitalized and transmitted, music researchers could, for example, swap records over the Net with "essentially perfect fidelity." So much for record stores (in present form).”

This stuff hasn't really reached the masses until maybe the last 10 years, probably closer to five for wide acceptance. Turns out network bandwidth for reasonably high fidelity music was 30 years away from this article's publication, but the fact is, the vision persisted, until it was finally realized, along with far more information transfer than even the furthest sighted midnight hackers could have forseen. From the view of the outsiders, it all happened so fast, since the adoption of the internet and of computers in general happened in an exponential fashion. In 1972, two years into it's life span, there were about 20 computers connected to ARPA-net. 35 years later, it is hard to keep an accurate tally of how many machines are connected to the network, for various technical reasons, but it is in the millions or billions of connected devices.

(Image grabbed from flickr, rights unknown.)