An old article denigrating the Internet

I read the following article published 27 years ago on the 26th February 1995.

Why the Web Won't Be Nirvana

This article adopts a similar disparaging tone to the article attacking virtual reality and the metaverse that I posted about yesterday in this blog. 

To quote a couple of parts:

Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet (sic). Uh, sure.

And:

Logged onto the World Wide Web, I hunt for the date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files show up, and it takes 15 minutes to unravel them—one's a biography written by an eighth grader, the second is a computer game that doesn't work and the third is an image of a London monument. None answers my question.

The same mistake is being made here as in the article attacking virtual reality and the metaverse.  Namely, both authors are attacking what the technology is like at the time the article was written and imagining it will never get significantly better.  Finding the date of the Battle of Trafalgar, for example, took me all of about 10 seconds.  

I should mention I'm frequently sceptical about predictions regarding technology (see here, here, here, here, here) and especially about the overly optimistic predictions about autonomous cars.  But sometimes, on odd occasions, a technology arrives that really will change the world.  The Internet was one, and I predict that virtual and augmented reality will eventually be another (maybe the metaverse too, although the term is a bit vague).