[ExI] it's better than it used to be

[Stefano Vaj]

On 30 April 2011 06:28, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> What could be envisioned is so fundamentally different from having it.  In
> Marconi's era, we could envision something analogous to a chat group and
> even web pages, but the storage medium would be primarily paper.  That would
> be so expensive and messy, no one would bother with it.  No one did back in
> the old days.

Mmhhh, I think that you could have explained Internet exactly as it
is, since all theoretical fundamentals for its later establishment had
already been put in place.

I am not absurdly arguing for the irrelevance of the Internet, and not
even of eBay, Wikipedia, Second Life, etc.

What I am trying to say is that as great as the social impact of it
may have been, how could you compare it with the breakthroughs I
mentioned before, and which to some extent made such things almost
inevitable, as they were *not* before?

We can be glad of having the Internet, rather than, say, a refined
version of Compuserve or Minitel, and graphical interfaces are a nice
touch over teletype-like computing. But the power grid and the
theoretical and technological infrastructure which allowed us to
establish it, is what really has been crucial in changing the world
and making all that feasible.

What are we doing now on such game-changing scale? From the horse to
the rocket, from the abacus to universal electronic computers, from
messengers and live performances to the recording and remote
transmission of sounds, images and data, from herbal tea to
vaccin/antibiotic/surgery based medicine?

-- 
Stefano Vaj