That’s cool you helped develop the ARPANET. I’m writing a book partly about the structure of the internet. What specifically did you work on?
I’m quite aware of the distinction between the www and the internet. Here I’m talking exclusively about the web between 1995 and 2002 — the dot-com boom and crash — and how regular people thought of…
That’s cool you helped develop the ARPANET. I’m writing a book partly about the structure of the internet. What specifically did you work on?
I’m quite aware of the distinction between the www and the internet. Here I’m talking exclusively about the web between 1995 and 2002 — the dot-com boom and crash — and how regular people thought of it. As an insider with technical knowledge, you probably didn’t go bipolar during the boom and bust, but a lot of other people did. Here’s some insight about contemporaneous popular perceptions:
<<“After the bubble burst,” said [Jeffrey] Cole [director of the Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg], “it was amazing to see how many people in industry assumed that the collapse meant the end of the internet itself.”
“We had been studying the internet since the early 90s,” Cole remembered, “and at meetings I would be asked, ‘now that this internet thing is over, what are you going to do now?’ They assumed that when the bubble burst, the usefulness of the internet had ended – and as a result they wouldn’t have to relearn how the business world works.
“And I wasn’t just hearing this view from leadership in retail – it was journalists, advertising executives, and people in other fields as well.>>
This is the kind of popular and market perception that I’m talking about. PH, the original commenter, said there was nowhere near this level of hype about the web, but there was in fact an enormous amount of hype about web businesses in the late 90s; they dominated the advertising in Super Bowls, and their funny-money business models became open jokes, even as their stock prices kept skyrocketing. There was so much hype and investment that a significant amount of the American economy depended on dot-coms, and the crash was the predominant cause of the full-blown recession in 2001.
Obviously there are important differences between the web and LLMs, but there are marked similarities in their hype cycles.
(Edit: it seems I replied to Chad, but I meant to reply to PH. It's that damn www acting up again!)
That’s cool you helped develop the ARPANET. I’m writing a book partly about the structure of the internet. What specifically did you work on?
I’m quite aware of the distinction between the www and the internet. Here I’m talking exclusively about the web between 1995 and 2002 — the dot-com boom and crash — and how regular people thought of it. As an insider with technical knowledge, you probably didn’t go bipolar during the boom and bust, but a lot of other people did. Here’s some insight about contemporaneous popular perceptions:
<<“After the bubble burst,” said [Jeffrey] Cole [director of the Center for the Digital Future at USC Annenberg], “it was amazing to see how many people in industry assumed that the collapse meant the end of the internet itself.”
“We had been studying the internet since the early 90s,” Cole remembered, “and at meetings I would be asked, ‘now that this internet thing is over, what are you going to do now?’ They assumed that when the bubble burst, the usefulness of the internet had ended – and as a result they wouldn’t have to relearn how the business world works.
“And I wasn’t just hearing this view from leadership in retail – it was journalists, advertising executives, and people in other fields as well.>>
This is the kind of popular and market perception that I’m talking about. PH, the original commenter, said there was nowhere near this level of hype about the web, but there was in fact an enormous amount of hype about web businesses in the late 90s; they dominated the advertising in Super Bowls, and their funny-money business models became open jokes, even as their stock prices kept skyrocketing. There was so much hype and investment that a significant amount of the American economy depended on dot-coms, and the crash was the predominant cause of the full-blown recession in 2001.
Obviously there are important differences between the web and LLMs, but there are marked similarities in their hype cycles.
(Edit: it seems I replied to Chad, but I meant to reply to PH. It's that damn www acting up again!)