[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.