LOL! You’re not the first person to underestimate the resilience of the 
Internet:


“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” – Ken Olsen, 
CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation (now defunct), 1977


"I see little commercial potential for the internet for the next 10 years," 
Bill Gates Comdex 1994.


27 February 1995, Newsweek magazine, quoting astronomer Clifford Stoll:

“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. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book 
on disc.  Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that 
we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.”

(17 years later, Newsweek ceased print publication and became exclusively 
available online).


Robert Metcalfe, InfoWorld columnist and the inventor of Ethernet, also in 1995:

 “I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 
catastrophically collapse.”


Clifford Stoll 1998: “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 
obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the 
entire Internet handles in a month?”


Of course, it’s not all cake and roses:


“Two years from now, spam will be solved.” – Bill Gates (2004)


 -mel

On Aug 9, 2022, at 7:24 PM, Christopher Wolff <ch...@vergeinternet.com> wrote:

Hi folks,

Has anyone proposed that the adoption of billions of IoT devices will 
ultimately ‘break’ the Internet?

It’s not a rhetorical question I promise, just looking for a journal or other 
scholarly article that implies that the Internet is doomed.


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