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Fifteen years ago, the Internet was a complete mess. No Google, no Twitter, no Facebook—imagine the horror! That’s probably why Newsweek, in 1995, printed the now infamous article entitled “The Internet? Bah!”. If you haven’t yet read the piece, it’s worth a look. The article is a hotbed for quotes that’ll have you grinning proudly about how wrong the author, Clifford Stoll, was, and how far the Internet has come.

See some excerpts below:

Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping–just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month?

The truth is, no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Internet: 1 Stoll: 0

Full story at The Next Web.

More, current Newsweek content.

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