[julian_1]

> reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network.

It's difficult to avoid the comparison with Bill Gate's book "the road ahead" published a decade later, that first neglected and then had to be revised in hardback edition to include the internet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Ahead_(Bill_Gates_boo...

[Spooky23]

Gates was wrong about the internet, but he assumed that proprietary networks like MSN, AOL, etc would be the network.

Given the dominance of Facebook, etc, he may have been right the first time!

[adventured]

Microsoft was utilizing the Internet for business by the mid 1980s, they weren't oblivious to it. Gates viewed there as being two approaches that might win, one he preferred to call the Information Superhighway (basically closed platforms over high-speed cable), and the other being the Internet. He thought the Internet would lose because of how slow it was in the early days, and it was very mediocre at video and interaction initially. Gates and Microsoft were fully aware of the coming value in networking up systems, the only debate was what form that would take, not whether it would be a big deal.

[julian_1]

I remember when the tcp stack for Windows 3x was a third party application. https://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/