[treblig]

Jobs, conceptually articulating what would become the Internet in 1985:

"The most compelling reason for most people to buy a computer for the home will be to link it into a nationwide communications network. We’re just in the beginning stages of what will be a truly remarkable breakthrough for most people—as remarkable as the telephone."

[dsrguru]

You beat me to posting this. He was as right as Asimov in 1964 about landing unmanned rovers on Mars by 2014 but still no people, and he was as right as Paul Graham was in 2001 about software moving to the server and clients moving to pocket computers that might be called cell phones by historical accident [1]. Predictions might be fun to boast about in hindsight or to demonstrate through entrepreneurship, but reading documented quotes that were just this spot on is really cool.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/road.html

"With Web-based software, most users won't have to think about anything except the applications they use. All the messy, changing stuff will be sitting on a server somewhere, maintained by the kind of people who are good at that kind of thing. And so you won't ordinarily need a computer, per se, to use software. All you'll need will be something with a keyboard, a screen, and a Web browser. Maybe it will have wireless Internet access. Maybe it will also be your cell phone. Whatever it is, it will be consumer electronics: something that costs about $200, and that people choose mostly based on how the case looks. You'll pay more for Internet services than you do for the hardware, just as you do now with telephones."

[asveikau]

I don't think it was all that unconventional to think computer networking was going to be big in the mid 1980s. Especially for someone like Jobs who was watching the industry and based in Silicon Valley where it would have been more obvious. (Note that he talks about IBM wiring up large companies.) Look at this google ngram for "information age" - already in full swing by 1982. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=information+ag... -- Note also some pop culture of the time, like War Games where Matthew Broderick orders plane tickets via modem (among other things), or Ghostbusters where Egon declares "print is dead". Even Back to the Future II depicts 2015 having video conferencing and peer to peer payment. (Still waiting on hoverboards...)

Jobs' observations seem spot on and they are, but I think this was already in the consciousnesses for the industry at that time. It only seems out there compared to what "regular people" outside the niche would have said. Or possibly to those of us who are too young to remember the kind of attitudes you'd hear in the 80s. (I barely remember this, but it was definitely there...)

Your pg quotes are also notable for what they got wrong. I read that as a "web browser as dumb terminal" view - not unconventional for its time. As we've seen, first with JavaScript and then with mobile apps instead of the browser, complexity in the client and running code locally is still a good thing. For many tasks the web has lost.

[drzaiusapelord]

Unfortunately, Jobs as visionary is a meme that sticks. Of course, by '85 the idea of a nationwide or world-wide network was common amongst nerds. Heck, around that time I was a kid with a modem then dialing into BBS's. We were already in the baby steps of it all. Universities certainly were ahead of the consumer market with ARPANET and NSFNET, I think at 1.5mbps. Not sure if compuserv was up yet, but it was certainly around that time.

The story of the birth of the internet is an interesting one that had little to no involvement from guys like Jobs, who were fixated on the new desktop market and were shockingly short-sighted in regards to networking. When did we even have an integrated by default modem in the 80s? The desktop guys talked a big game regarding the future, but knew their bread was buttered by hardware and software sales and this whole dial-up thing wasn't profitable for them. In fact, it was kinda a threat. I spent a lot more time playing things like Tradewars (or other doors games) or MUDs, for free, than buying the AAA titles of the time, which I found boring because they couldn't do online multiplayer.

[asveikau]

I do give Jobs some credit for being able to articulate these ideas pretty well. I am guessing he was surrounding himself with smart people and it isn't totally his. But he does well with it, in this interview and others from the time period.

But we shouldn't elevate it to something it's not. The cynical view, and to an extent a correct one, is that this is 1980s conventional wisdom mixed with a guy trying to sell computers.

[zurn]

These predictions were very commonplace by then. In 1983, TCP/IP came along and MILNET was split off. This is commonly considered to mark the start of the Internet. First .com domain was registered in 1985.

[icebraining]

Not to mention other services like Minitel, which already had one million users in France.

[drblast]

Remember "The Network Is The Computer?"

1984.

http://www.tcse-k12.org/pages/network.pdf

[leoc]

The further twist is that just a few months after this interview, Jobs left Apple and founded a company to build graphical, Ethernet-connected, UNIX-based personal workstations: in other words to compete on Sun's turf. I think the Sun/Apple and Sun/NeXT relationship is an interesting, underexplored part of an overtold story, especially since by 2000 Apple had more or less stolen Sun's original clothes as a profitable vendor of Unix workstations.

[adamnemecek]

Pff that will never take off http://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirva...

[mpweiher]

Wonderful link!

"...no online database will replace your daily newspaper..."

"Newsweek now back in print!"

[dragonwriter]

> Jobs, conceptually articulating what would become the Internet in 1985:

Which wasn't a huge prediction; CompuServe's consumer offering had been available for years (and they had at least one smaller national competitor, The Source), and the BBS scene including BBS networks was already a thing. The value of computers as communication devices especially in a network with wide penetration wasn't something that the many observers at the time who made similar comments were extrapolating from scant evidence, its something that people had concrete experience with in the mid-1980s where the trend toward it becoming a key use of computers was widely recognized in social commentary, fiction, etc.