2001 in review

YEARS SEEM longer and longer. It becomes increasingly difficult to remember back as far as January from the end of December, even in a year that doesn't have a huge bump in it around mid-September causing a total disconnect between the first three-quarters of the year and the last quarter.

2001 opened with comparisons to Kubrick's movie. Where was HAL? Where's commercial space flight and Ma Bell-logoed videotelephones? Instead, we were (and are) surrounded by computers that create havoc but are too stupid to be evil. Looking back at NTK, I see that BT's futurologist, Ian Pearson, surmised in January that the BT telephone network has more connections than the human brain, and the company was worried that consciousness might start to emerge. Come on: merely connecting up the right number of transports for data isn't sufficient. The carrier's membrane has to be sufficiently permeable for processing of some kind, whether chemical or electronic, to take place within the network.

The end of January/early February was the stock market peak - the FTSE 100 hit roughly 6,250 and the NASDAQ hit 2892, though the Dow Jones average peaked later, at just under 11,500, in mid-May. CNBC was filled, briefly, with optimism that the market would come back after the dot-com crashes of 2000. Of course, as we all now know, not only did the market continue its downturn and dot-com busts continue apace, but the whole mess took a much nastier slide in September than anyone imagined.

Which reminds me: dozens, perhaps hundreds, of psychics fill the newspapers every year with their predictions for the coming twelve months. As David Bloomberg points out here, even just a few weeks before the attacks, none of four top psychics asked to make predictions about the fall US TV viewing schedule foresaw the TV coverage, let alone the attacks themselves.

Nor did anyone forsee the double postponement of the Emmy Awards. We'll have to wait for the official tally of psychics who missed the attacks until Gene Emery compiles his annual report of failed psychic predictions for CSIPOP.

March's Computers, Freedom, and Privacy conference was bludgeoned by brinksmanship planning coupled with a sudden blizzard.

Nonetheless, this was the moment I discovered 802.11b was going to take over the world. I went out and bought a card for my laptop the day the conference ended. "What is the sound of one wireless card pinging?" one of my friends asked at the time. But in fact 802.11b is beginning to paint many places with wireless connectivity, from airport terminals in the US to free nodes around London being set up cooperatively by Consume Net.

Every technical conference in the US now sets up 802.11b access points so attendees can access the Internet from anywhere in the conference space, as I found out in September at P2P.

Great, you may think: now everyone can ignore the speaker in favour of checking their email. But in fact what happens is an augmented conference experience, where if someone mentions a Web site or judicial decision you can pull it up for reference while they're talking instead of scribbling the address down to look up later, after you've forgotten what you were supposed to look at. Downloading MP3s made a satisfying accompaniment to the RIAA's Hilary Rosen's speech.

This was also the year where broadband should have finally reached the point where everyone who wanted it was able to get it. Yet I am still the only person I know who can choose between ADSL (multiple suppliers) and cable modem (Telewest). The year ended with Excite@Home filing for bankruptcy protection in the US and news that broadband rollout, although Jupiter thinks it will triple next year, won't reach even 15 percent of the population until 2006. The good news: we'll be able to install ADSL ourselves soon. Sort of a shame. The engineers from BT and Telewest all looked so cute poring over those diagrams and all that unfamiliar equipment.

Plus, of course, this was the year when 3G mobile was supposed to take off. By this summer it was clear that a GSM-enabled Psion Dacom Gold Card plugged into a mobile phone let a whole laptop go online and do everything. That's if no one's left their 802.11b network open. There are some really intriguing WAP services hatching out there, especially in the area of games, but it's all happening immensely slowly. In the US, of course, mobile telephony is so hopelessly messed up that AT&T Wireless can claim to be a major player (hideously ill- informed customer service; badly uneven coverage; hate their pre-pay so much they're trying to kill it) despite a serious death wish.

Even before September 11 the British computer press was seeing cutbacks; after September 11 about half of it simply died. Some of Britain's best and most experienced IT journalists were cut loose in the last couple of months; dotcomTelegraph and the Times Interface sections are gone. And civil liberties are under the worst threat for decades.

So to 2002. Here's what I thought this year would look like four years ago . Have I done better than the psychics? Previous Columns
Care in the community
Remembrance of postings past
BT's Stupid Patent Tricks
Preserving our freedoms
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas
Net is the mother of re-invention
Save the Cookie
net.wars: Digital rights and the new era of world terrorism

Wendy M. Grossman, whose Web site is pelicancross ing.net, is author of From Anarchy to Power: the Net Comes of Age (NYU Press, 2001), net.wars (NYU Press, 1998), and the Daily Telegraph A-Z Guide to the Internet (Macmillan, 2001). She can be reached at this email address.