Is Your Phone Killing the Internet?
by Simone Santini
In the 1980s, information appliances such as dedicated word processing systems often worked better than other programs available at the time, and with considerably less hassle. In the early 1990s, proprietary network services such as AOL or Compuserve had more content and were more user-friendly than the Internet, with its arcane Unix command lines and mainly academic content.
What made the Internet and the programmable personal computer a successful pair was a characteristic none of the alternatives offered: they are generative (J. Zittran, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, Yale Univ. Press, 2008). Read More »
