[diego_moita]

This reminds me an edition of Byte Magazine from 1990 [1] with interviews of all big shots in the industry making forecasts for the next decade.

No one foresaw the internet.

At best they did expect things like "we'll have networks with bigger bandwith".

But no one saw the economic and cultural boom ahead.

[1] https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1990-09

[sammalloy]

> No one foresaw the internet.

That’s because it was Byte magazine. If you were reading High Frontiers (1984), which became Reality Hackers (1988) and finally Mondo 2000 (1989), you would have thought otherwise. I used to buy them at Tower Records throughout California primarily to read about what the internet was to become. By 1990, Mondo 2000 foresaw and had a fairly complete vision of the nascent internet. A lot of the artists involved went on to produce independent works that promoted these ideas. Around 1992-93, I saw a theatrical production in SF that simulated and modeled the entirety of what life was going to be like and how it would work in a connected world. These are very old ideas (E.M Forster, 1909; Vannevar Bush, 1945; Marshall McLuhan, 1964) and many people were aware of and working towards manifesting them in reality.

[pncnmnp]

Thank you! I did some digging and discovered an article from Mondo 2000 - "Hyperwebs" by Wes Thomas (1989). You can find it at https://archive.org/details/Mondo.2000.Issue.01.1989/page/n2....

I'm looking forward to exploring more of their archive:

Mondo 2000: https://anarchivism.org/w/Mondo_2000

High Frontiers: https://anarchivism.org/w/High_Frontiers

[Jtsummers]

That seems an odd claim that no one foresaw the Internet when the Internet existed at the time of the interviews, so why would they be predicting the existence of something which already existed?

Unless you mean the Web? Reading through the forecasts I'm not seeing any that call out something quite exactly like became the Web, but there are a number of network-based predictions, and certainly better than "bigger bandwidth".

[diego_moita]

As I wrote above, no one mentions the economic and cultural impact.

And yes, that was driven mostly by the Web.

[Jtsummers]

There are a number of mentions of economic and cultural impact, but the majority of the questions asked of the interviewees aren't about networks and communication. They're about things like cost, availability, and capability of hardware systems. But if you read the magazine you linked, when communications come up the potential economic and cultural impact is discussed (though you end up with people forecasting it both ways, as a non-impactful thing, culturally, and others predicting major impacts like changing governments).

Check page 366 for a couple examples on both sides of the forecast.

And then there are the sections on Project Xanadu as well as hypertext and hyperdocuments that get a couple pages each.

[jeremyjh]

> But no one saw the economic and cultural boom ahead.

Quite a lot of science fiction authors did indeed see this coming.

[diego_moita]

You know, it is all about the false negatives and false positives.

A lot of science fiction authors foresee a lot. And a lot of what they foresee ends up not happening.

They're much like the soothsayer that predicts 100 things but only remembers the one that happened and forgets all the others.