Wired has a series of fascinating articles that study the past, present, and future of the internet.
The Past:
In late 1994, Time magazine explained why the Internet would never go mainstream: “It was not designed for doing commerce, and it does not gracefully accommodate new arrivals.”
The Present:
In fewer than 4,000 days, we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world’s population.
The Future:
By 2015, desktop operating systems will be largely irrelevant. The Web will be the only OS worth coding for. It won’t matter what device you use, as long as it runs on the Web OS. You will reach the same distributed computer whether you log on via phone, PDA, laptop, or HDTV.