...but Robert Heinlein predicted why or rather how the web would work on us. In 'Friday,' he gets wrong that it will be a system with metered, limited access...
...but (to my mind, remarkably) predicts that multimedia-enabled hypertext will lead to associative impulsive serendipitous browsing, not structured intentional behavior. The one scene in which the eponymous character interacts with the network is given primarily to a discussion of her own digression into subjects far afield from her nominal research topic.
...he also predicts that this might provide surprising value.
He also described it as a hierarchical system: Set your terminal to "research." Punch parameters in succession "North American culture," "English-speaking," "mid-twentieth century," "comedians,", "the World's Greatest Authority." The answer you can expect is "Professor Irwin Corey." You'll find his routines timeless humor.
Mind you, this is after Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think" and Memex, which got many people excited about the idea. This in turn was influenced by earlier investigations by Davis and Draeger in 1935 on searching with microfilm.
In the last year I've been researching earlier information systems, including those of the punch card era. Calvin Mooers, in his paper "Making Information Retrieval Pay", which coined the term "information retrieval", proposes a mechanical search engine called DOKEN which could handle Heinlein's proposed query (see http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=4243 ), except that "Professor Irwin Corey" is too specific to be an index query using Zatocoding.
I guess it comes down to how one consider "metered".
Seems the various carriers and ISPs have discovered that they earn more by offering package deals, because the customer is likely to overshoot on the package to avoid the overcharge fees.
But in many places net access was/is metered, by virtue of it being done over the metered phone network. For me the biggest deal with DSL and later was that the metering of dial-up went away (tho at least one ISP tried to introduce a stair step payment system).
...but (to my mind, remarkably) predicts that multimedia-enabled hypertext will lead to associative impulsive serendipitous browsing, not structured intentional behavior. The one scene in which the eponymous character interacts with the network is given primarily to a discussion of her own digression into subjects far afield from her nominal research topic.
...he also predicts that this might provide surprising value.
RIP RAL!