7 Top Futurists Make Some Pretty Surprising Predictions About What The Next Decade Will Bring

[hunter]

64. He was a big time Atari 800 fan back then, maybe still is, like me.

He was active on some of the larger boards, GEnie, Delphi, I don't recall.

I first logged onto the internet in 1979 (long before the World Wide Web existed) and very soon after it became possible recreated myself as one of the earlier semi-pseudonymous assholes.

Card wasn't quite the libertarian dick he was then as he is now, or maybe he felt he had to be more discreet because he wasn't yet secure in his dickishness.

While he was writing Ender's Game he did have some experience with these early networks, and was not unaware of previous work.

Ted Nelson was talking about hypertext and hypermedia in the 'sixties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Nelson

From my perspective commercial interests slugging it out with one another (and Nelson's overwhelming compulsion to control every aspect of his vision's development) delayed the emergence of anything like a World Wide Web.

The turning point in all of this, I think, was the development of BSD as an easily licensed alternative to AT&T's Unix. The "phone companies" very much wanted to fully control these new networks as a monopoly, just as they controlled voice communication.