The Information Superhighway - whats in a name?

In an alternative reality, we are all surfing the Information Superhighway. Not the Internet or WiFi but zooming down the highway.

The phrase that Al Gore (apocryphally) came up with but that did not stick in our description of having rapid access to anything that we so desire, as foreseen in this wonderful Tomorrow’s World clip.

Would it have turned out the way it is now with that name? Where almost all of what was described in the video now is more than possible, albeit with some implementation differences (I love the thinness of my TV, compared to that great big cube of a display they watched that on demand programme on).

As for the on screen shopping when you pause the programme, that ‘Jennifer Aniston’s Sweater’ is still being attempted and the processes are mostly just as clumsy as it was on this Tomorrow’s World clip. There are some more innovative mechanisms available, that take the interaction away from the big screen down to your smartphone for a much improved way of having personalised trusted interactions (ask me about Minfo, a trusted engagement company that bridges screen to the real world and back that I am advising), but the big players are still plugging away with halting the consumption of video and taking you away from what you actually were interested in - which is pretty poor in its execution.

But going back to the name - Information Superhighway. It became a bit of a joke, primarily because it was ‘invented’ by Al Gore, but really it came across as being a puffed up, hyperbolic term, and the world went instead with the technical name ‘ the Internet’. Like many projects before it, the codename became the actual product name.

But ‘the Internet’ was not a codename. It actually is a name that is more specific and descriptive than the Super Highway - because it was the term for a network of networks, which is what the Internet actually is. A whole collection of separate network that became linked together into an ‘Internetwork of networks’ or Internet for short. I remember that time in the past when networks were islands, not global, with differing protocols that required ‘Gateways’ to convert between them. In fact at the time of this video, there were still many ‘Gateways’ around converting from IPX to IP, from SMTP to ATT Mail, Compuserve or AOL and back again. That was back when getting a few bits from one place to another was not 100% guaranteed, or even possible.

I know this much, the name ‘Internet’ is shorter and has saved many typed characters but for many people, it is not called this any more. For many people, the whole access to the Internet in their home has become named after what most people grasp first - the WiFi. Annoying though that is for us who understand the whole Internet chain that provides something they could only dream of back in 1994, that is what it gets called.

Going back 32 years to tell people about what we have now, would literally blow their minds. I know sometimes I take a step back about how I have better Internet in my house now than entire companies had back in the mid 2010s, but that thought is brief and I soon get back to doing my everyday work, and not worry about my 10’s to 100’s of GBs of data that I transfer EVERY SINGLE DAY all around the world. Oh, and last night’s World Cup that I streamed in marvellous 4K HDR all the way to the end.

It would be a little more geekier if we still called it the Information Superhighway...