The Web is 20 years old, what now in the next 20?

The most recent edition of ON Magazine contains fabulous articles and interviews industry luminaries reflecting on the 20th anniversary of the Web and on its potential over the next 20 years. Interviewees were posed three questions by EMC:

 ○ How has the Web changed your life?
 ○ How has the Web changed business and society?
 ○ What will the Web look like in 20 years?

The breadth and depth of responses has inspired fellow bloggers inside EMC and out to contemplate the same questions from their own unique perspectives.  Colleague  Kathryn Winkler, Vice President and Chief Sustainability Officer at EMC, has tagged me to contribute my story and encourage you to comment as well.

How has the Web changed my life?

I might otherwise have become a motorcycle mechanic. In the spring of 1971 I had wanted to take the Saturday course at the city high school on motorcycle engine repair, but when the registrar discovered I was a girl, I was blocked. Of course, that wouldn’t happen today. J My parents went to war with the city to get me admitted, and in the meantime as I shopped around for something else, my eye was caught by a computer course being held  in the basement of Dalhousie University‘s Library, so I signed up.  And within the first hour, I fell in love with the technology even though I was a terrible programmer. (Turns out I’m a pretty mediocre mechanic too).  But I was helped by other high schoolers that were far more adept and felt sorry for me as I thrashed through my assembler subroutines.  But it didn’t matter, I was enthralled. I went on to complete a Math degree with a minor in Computer Science, and later an MBA focusing on the Strategic use of Technology, and did get to practice mechanics on a dozen or so motorcycles over the years.  But the glee of being around technology has never left me, even as it becomes pervasive.  I remember the exact moment the penny dropped for me; I was stunned, realizing it would change everything.  It was 1992 and my consulting colleague Ken Rossen  showed me gopher  while we were at Dow Jones completing an Enterprise Wide Architecture engagement, helping them strategize on how to make an electronic version of the Wall Street Journal that people might one day read on tablets on the trains. It was a vision then, but a reality now, 20 years later.  This month, as I watch Apple’s ipad being launched, I feel a part of it and a sense of satisfaction as what we dreamed about, on that, and many other strategy engagements, unfolds. 

How has the Web changed business and society?

The paradox however, is that the web has leveled, empowered and liberated us, but also commoditized and distanced us from ourselves. Leveling the field of information lets us all see around corners, up and down, over, in and out, and helps makes the unfathomable more understandable. Seeing the latest Hubble shots helps us imagine our place in the multi-verse; watching 3d visualizations of hyperbolic paraboloids and fractals  brings mathematics to life; connecting serendipitously through twitter or stumble upon makes it possible for us to question in hitherto unthinkable ways, and imagine ourselves into new ways of being. So many good things have happened through the web, crowdsourcing us together in a global community. But, at the same time, we all have experienced how a few clicks away can be so artificially close.  Sometimes I long for the days growing up in Nova Scotia when people would just drop by for a cuppa, and catch up on the news over a long, leisurely conversation. Now, we pseudo-connect through Skype.  The complexity is enormous and fragile, precarious. In so many ways, we’ve passed the point of no return.  But let’s be clear: We don’t have a choice about this; business totally and absolutely depends on the interconnectivity of the web.

What will the Web look like in 20 years?

I don’t think there will be a web in 20 years. Last year conversion to LTE networks began, bringing the next generation of advanced mobile computing to life. Over the years what we know as the web will have morphed beyond the semantic web into a new kind of electronic fabric that will be so embedded in our lives it will essentially be an extension of ourselves.  Ray Kurzweil talks and writes about the singularity, where technologies advance to the point of where we as humans evolve beyond our biological limitations – with profound social and spiritual ramifications.  Ray estimates that by 2045, non-biological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today. So, 20 years from now, 2030, we will be well on our way….

What’s your story? How has the web changed your life, our society and business? What will it look like in 20 years?

Comments

[Gareth Patterson]

In 1994, at my kitchen table in Minneapolis, Gary Pollreis showed me this weird thing called a PPP dialer. I knew what the internet was... I knew that I could connect computers to each other with it and send email to other companies (if you could remember the weird syntax for the email. Yes kids, there used to be email that was only within a single company)

Then Gary fired up something unbelievable... Netscape. I don't remember the first site he brought up, and it wasn't immediately clear what this thing was. But pretty quickly, I got it. And while there wasn't much to look at of real interest there, it opened a new world.

In 1996, I started a company in Nova Scotia that allowed people to submit webforms and have them come out of a fax machine. (Idea was that pizza joints could take orders online) Or receive email on a fax machine.

In 1993, I had previously started a company that allowed people to fax in a form with a vehicle identification number to get the car history... imagine... a fax machine as an input device!!!

Yes... 1993. Not 100 years ago... just 17-years ago, that was high tech!

So, look forward 17 (or 20 years) and think of the energy, money and raw human talent that is pushing us forward. I don't think any of us can pretend to accurately predict what technology will look like. All I know is that my kids couldn't imagine a world without Google and the internet! I'm not sure I remember what it was like either!

[gminks]

You couldn't go to motorcycle school because you are a woman? That blows my mind!

I loved this sentence: "The paradox however, is that the web has leveled, empowered and liberated us, but also commoditized and distanced us from ourselves."

That is so true, and I worry very much about the commoditization of the web. And you are right, there is no going back.

[David Stockwell]

First time I got onto the "web" (1993 or 1994), I was running an early browser on OS/2 (using maybe 9600 baud dialup), because Microsoft had not yet deemed web browsers "worthy".

Back then, of course, Windows 3.1 sat on top of DOS, and if you tried to do anything useful with it (like write/save/print a 100+ page document), you had to reboot every time you did anything, because of the limited system memory space (64k) and the memory leaks that generally corrupted everything.

[Ken Rossen]

Great post, Yo! I'm thrilled to be part of that memory.

I was privileged to be working on the ARPANET some 10 years earlier even than that - to 1984, at U of Illinois and Compion Corporation (which probably still exists as a part of Motorola now). Then, we used newsgroups and notesfiles, which were blogs and wikis all rolled into one, but with no graphics and no hyperlinks. Most of that traffic went around the world using UUCP and huge webs of asynchronous dial-up communication. It didn't mostly go by TCP/IP, which was still mostly military and R&D only.

I went on from there to Bolt Beranek & Newman, where the first commercial packet switches were being built and formed into networks, building on their success in ARPANET and MILNET. I sought out BBN because they were at the center of this networking innovation, and even back in 1985 the sense of promise was palpable.

When Dave, you, and I were working together at Dow Jones in 1993, it was certainly a time of tremendous change. I remember demoing Gopher to the customer, as well as WAIS, which was of tremendous interest to DJ because managing huge amounts of text was central to their mission.

That very fall, the first graphic browser, Mosaic was released and I remember it setting a record for download volume.

In 2010, I agree that the web is fading into the landscape. My 12-year-old son has his first wireless phone, a netbook, and smartboards and Skype video in the classroom, He doesn't think about the web as distinct from the world. He is living proof of a headline I saw recently: "if your kids are awake, they're probably online." SMS and e-mail and digital content and conversations of all kids are on a par for him. The web is the world.

I remember conversations with Vint Cerf and others at IETF meetings circa 1989 about an IP address space that would provide for your toaster to be addressible. Now there are IP-addressible refrigerators.

The pervasiveness of the connected world is why GRC is so in focus now. GRC represents the knobs and switches on the pervasive connectivity and information flow that our world is settling into. In order for the connected world to empower rather than cripple us, we need the controls and delineation we now call GRC.

[Stephanie Spence]

It's great that Ken, David and Gareth have shared some thoughts on this... and for me, the web has changed my life in such a way, for such a long time that I nearly cannot remember 1. Having to physically use the Dewey Demimal System and 2.Having to shop in a store instead of on my computer. Wow, I can't even imagine what the next 20 years will bring...