THE CYBER-ROAD NOT TAKEN - The Washington Post

AH, CHEZ Info-Highway, the trendiest eating spot in town. Suave Al Gore is the maitre d'. Genius chefs ranging from Bill Gates to John Malone smile mysteriously from the kitchen. The critics are gaga. ("The end of the world as we know it," the Economist reports.) The patrons are magnificent: Washington FOBs jostling Silicon Valley technocrats, Hollywood bigwigs and Japanese financiers. What a scene! There's only one problem: The food stinks. If you try to ascertain what the much-vaunted information highway is actually serving for dinner, the answers you will get range from insipid to ridiculous. We have gone through all this before, within living memory. Futurists, the technical community and the public were at least as excited about television in the '30s and '40s as we are today about the information highway. Commercial television, one observer confidently predicted in 1942, would reinvigorate family ties and make cities unnecessary. Others foresaw culture and the arts permeating and

AH, CHEZ Info-Highway, the trendiest eating spot in town. Suave Al Gore is the maitre d'. Genius chefs ranging from Bill Gates to John Malone smile mysteriously from the kitchen. The critics are gaga. ("The end of the world as we know it," the Economist reports.) The patrons are magnificent: Washington FOBs jostling Silicon Valley technocrats, Hollywood bigwigs and Japanese financiers. What a scene! There's only one problem: The food stinks. If you try to ascertain what the much-vaunted information highway is actually serving for dinner, the answers you will get range from insipid to ridiculou