The Aeroplane is just a toy

Newsweek 1995 15 years last week:
The Internet? Bah! Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn’t, and will never be, nirvana

- Clifford Stoll operates an on-line store where he sells Klein Bottles. Read the whole thing, it's a hoot.

Here's WHY Mr Stoll got it wrong:
"After two decades online,.." That means he was on DarpaNet and to him UseNet was so far ahead of what was essentially a Maillist and chat room that he thought it was the ultimate. Today, half you guys say.."What's Usenet?" Well.. the answer is if this was 1995 we'd be a usenet group. "Rec.football.engpremierleague.fulhamfc"

The first WEb Sites were just becoming popular.. Google wasnt even thought of, Altavista was the newest search engine and had no contextual intelligence other than to rank by frequency of occurrence.
He'd been using a command line search tool called 'gopher'.

In short, Mr Stoll should have known better, he was 'Old School'.. the kind of guy who thought three or more panes of command lines on one screen were 'Windows'.