He told me I didn't understand, that we were from the bleak industrial wastes of North England, or something, and that we didn't understand the Internet. I told him Fall fans invented the Internet. They were on there in 1982.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Back in 1995, Bill Gates himself didn't understand that the internet was the direction computing was going.
When people say that the Internet is going to make us all geniuses, that was said about the telegraph. On the other hand, when they say the Internet is going to make us stupid, that also was said about the telegraph.
Here's the thing: I fell impossibly in love with the Internet from the minute I saw it in action in the early 1990s. From that moment on, I have studied it, analyzed it, reported on it, and, mostly, have not been without it as a part of my daily life since.
That was clearly surprising, interesting - a very interesting milestone was when you can pick up a magazine and read an article about some sort of computer related thing and they mention the word internet without explaining it.
I was a sophomore in college, and I did an industrial video about how to use the Internet - that dates me! It was with John Turturro, somehow they had gotten John Turturro to do this thing, and I was so excited and so nervous I probably drank 10 cups of coffee that morning.
Around '93, '94, the conventional wisdom about the Internet was that it was a toy for academics and researchers. So it was very, very underestimated for about two years.
If Al Gore invented the Internet, I invented spell check.
Through a blog, an ordinary citizen such as myself can use the Internet, this thing invented by Albert Gore, to talk from my house to the U.S. capital and to make use of my right to point out to government officials and to the media when they are wrong.
Frank Schirrmacher's passing is a great loss. Among the intellectuals, he, along with Friedrich Kittler, was the only one who understood the philosophical dimensions of the Internet.
No matter how much Bill Gates may claim otherwise, he missed the Internet, like a barreling freight train that he didn't hear or see coming.