The Internet at the Turn of the Millenium

Pavel Curtis, Xerox PARC
pavel@parc.xerox.com

Seminar on People, Computers, and Design
Stanford University February 17, 1995

 

We keep hearing about the net and the millions of new people using it every day, so why don't I ever run into any of them there? Current visions of the "National Information Infrastructure" make it sound like a big, vacant reference library. Instead, it should be more like a town, with many people interacting with each other as they go about their activities.

I'll talk about our research into the design and construction of 'network places', including a discussion of Jupiter, our current system based around multimedia extensions to a MUD, and the Fabric, our vision for the next system, intended to scale to the size of the full Internet.

 

Dr. Pavel Curtis has been a member of the research community at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center since 1983, during which time he has worked on aspects of the Smalltalk-80, Interlisp-D/Xerox Lisp, and Cedar programming environments and on other projects mostly related to the design and implementation of programming languages, including leadership of the SchemeXerox project exploring large-scale software development in the Scheme programming language. He is the founder and chief administrator of LambdaMOO, one of the most popular recreational social virtual realities on the Internet. His current work centers on the Social Virtual Reality project, investigating the implementation, applications, and implications of systems that allow multiple simultaneous users to communicate and interact in pseudo-physical surroundings.

 

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