[extropy-chat] Who Anticipated Internet Exploding in 90s?

[Charlie Stross]

On 2 Dec 2003, at 22:55, Robin Hanson wrote:

> I just read someone who said:
>
> "no one anticipated the explosive diffusion of the Internet during the 
> 1990s"
>
> and I figured that this can't be right - surely someone must have had 
> the dumb luck to predict such a thing before 1990.  Can anyone point 
> to a quote?

Surely "True Names" by Vernor Vinge counts? He had the net as a 
ubiquitous service, certainly, and that was published in 1980. And I'm 
pretty certain it was explicitly the internet -- or an n'th generation 
descendant -- that he was talking about.

Caveat: fictional source, rather than academic paper.



-- Charlie