The Internet was born as early as 1969, but no later than 1983, depending on what you consider to be the event most analogous to a 'birth'. However, only a tiny fraction of the world's people were aware of the Internet even in the early 1990s. Then, by 1994-95, the graphical browser from Netscape seemingly emerged from nowhere, opening up a wonderland that appeared to have the sum total of human knowledge instantly available to anyone with a computer.

This 'World Wide Web' was predicted by almost no one in the late 1980s and was absent from the vast majority of science fiction work depicting the late 1990s onwards, just five years before it happened (with the notable exception of Ray Kurzweil in his book "The Age of Intelligent Machines"). So many supposed 'great thinkers' missed it. How?

Because, while they could easily extrapolate exponential trends such as Moore's Law and the dropping cost of telephone calls/data transfer, almost no one thought about the bigger vision - combining the two.

1) By the late 1980s, personal computers were starting to make their way to the mass market. That most of the population might have bought their first PC by 1995 was an easy prediction.

2) Long-distance telephone rates were dropping through the full 20-year period from 1970 to 1990. That this would continue until costs would be virtually zero was an easy prediction. Plus, people already had modems and where exchanging data between computers in the 1980s.

But combining the two, for the grand vision of hundreds of millions of PCs collectively accessing and contributing to the growing World Wide Web of information, was the missing layer of analysis that almost every great thinker missed.

Notice how the number of internet hosts was already growing exponentially in the early 1990s, but the apparent 'knee of the curve' occurred after 1996.

So, the next question becomes : How do we make additional predictions by noticing multiple, steady exponential trends, and knowing which ones will combine into something explosive, at what time?

That is, of course, the $64 trillion question. I will venture a few, however, in the coming weeks. Stay tuned..........

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