Here is as excellent post in one of my photography forums. I thought it would be a good seed for a thread here since alot of your deep-thinking PIGGS had your beanie propeller spinning during the dawning of the Digital Age.
Allow me to go back in time, 1985 I guess. The Net didn’t exist yet. Science Fiction writers wrote about wrist communicators that would allow to send SMS messages all over the world. Ridiculous, isn’t it?
The world was dominated by number-cruncher IBM with their big machines with a whopping 1MB RAM in a cooled shrine eating punchcards fed by priests in white coats that were called IT engineers. Syntax error in card 67646 and there went your night.
There comes this young company that invented minicomputers, called DEC (Digital Eqp Corp). Ken Olson, the visionary and founder stood on the steps of the Cannes convention center, telling the eager pundits (no blogs too) that in the nineties, 50% of the computers would be “networked”. The pundits laughed out loud. I still remember the floodlights of the press. Why do you need a “network” to connect mainframes when hard-disks are cheaper? A 1MB disk was just 4000$. Cheesy
Ken didn’t know (or he did) that the PC and Macintosh would be around that same year. He threw his “Vaxmate” on the market there in Cannes, just to find out that 2 years later, the IBM PC destroyed his minicomputer market by a clever OS written by a college dropout nerd called Gates. I pulled the thick yellow Ethernet cable myself through the corridors since my company didn’t believe in this fad. I had to bribe the budget for the cable out of other budgets myself, but I had no personnel.
Since then, DEC is long gone and IBM and GM too. A Britt in Switzerland combined Gopher and hypertext into “http” and for a year (1991-1993?) it was the toy of rocket scientists. Little did we know. 640KB (RAM) ought to be enough for anyone, IBM declared, and they allowed Gates to write OS2/Windows, since the money was in hardware anyways. Hahahaha.
Enters Netscape 1.0, first with text-only, then with images. Those were the heydays of Compuserve dial-in for the in-crowd with their patented GIFs. It’s still 1994. My 56KB modem was a marvel, and so was my phone bill. Compuserve had its own chat, personal profile and sites. They let that weird Net in later, too little and too late.
The Net took the world by surprise and so did Google later. Web 2 was founded on the ruins of the first Bubble and tweets and faecesbooks destroyed fine social sites like MySpace and Friendster. Why? Myspace was fine.
How can we learn from the past when there is no past? In the digital WWW age there is no IP any more. The music industry has been ruined by it and the movie industry soon. Digital is free and there is an endless supply of it. The US lawyers may sue their @ss off but the US is done and over. They’re just printing money since China stopped buying US treasury shares.
China is buying Ireland and Greece, and soon Portugal. In 2012, they will surpass the US in economic power. IP ceases to exist East of Berlin. What does the West do? Insist on “human rights” when the IP elephant is all over the room.
There is no past you can learn from. This is a total different world, as the world was before 1985 and 1968 and 1945. Enjoy it while it lasts. It won’t last long.
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