Originally published August 22 2005
History of the internet could reveal new business opportunities
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Kevin Kelly, an old proponent of the internet, describes the difficult battle to convince business that the internet was "the thing of the future" back in 1989. In fact, the internet still has a lot of hidden potential not yet discovered by big business.
Ten years ago, Netscape's explosive IPO ignited huge piles of money.
Few of the hackers writing code for the emerging Web in the 1990s knew about Nelson or his hyperlinked dream machine.
At the suggestion of a computer-savvy friend, I got in touch with Nelson in 1984, a decade before Netscape.
Wearing a ballpoint pen on a string around his neck, he told me - way too earnestly for a bar at 4 o'clock in the afternoon - about his scheme for organizing all the knowledge of humanity.
Scribbling on index cards, he sketched out complicated notions of transferring authorship back to creators and tracking payments as readers hopped along networks of documents, what he called the docuverse.
It was going to save the world from stupidity.
Despite his quirks, it was clear to me that a hyperlinked world was inevitable - someday.
But looking back now, after 10 years of living online, what surprises me about the genesis of the Web is how much was missing from Vannevar Bush's vision, Nelson's docuverse, and my own expectations.
The revolution launched by Netscape's IPO was only marginally about hypertext and human knowledge.
At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since developed into an emerging culture based on sharing.
And the ways of participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking - part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history.
1995 Before the Netscape browser illuminated the Web, the Internet did not exist for most people.
Stephen Weiswasser, a senior VP, delivered the ultimate putdown: "The Internet will be the CB radio of the '90s," he told me, a charge he later repeated to the press.
Go down to your basement, find your most technical computer guy, and have him register abc.com immediately.
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