Into the Cloud

I was always clear, from like 1970, that networked computers were going to be necessary for sustainability of communities. So, then it was a matter of figuring out how to implement that. And it’s not like I suddenly woke up and said, Oh, this is important stuff. No, it was always important stuff for me.

—Lee Felsenstein

By 2000 the Internet was an integral part of life for millions of people. Indeed, 350 million or more people were online, the majority of them in the United States. That figure would grow by an order of magnitude over the next decade and a half, and more closely match the relative populations of countries. By 2014, China was home to the most Internet users.

Robert Metcalfe’s 1995 prediction that the web browser ...

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