Jonathan Zittrain Quotes

If the PC ceases to be at the center of the information technology ecosystem, the most restrictive aspects of information appliances will come to the fore.

Innovation within services like CompuServe took place at the center of the network rather than at its fringes. PCs were to be only the delivery vehicles for data sent to customers, and users were not themselves expected to program or to be able to receive services from anyone other than their central service provider. CompuServe depended on the phone network’s physical layer generativity to get the last mile to a subscriber’s house, but CompuServe as a service was not open to third-party tinkering.

The first online services built on top of AT&T’s phone network were natural extensions of the 1960s IBM-model minicomputer usage within businesses: one centrally managed machine to which employees’ dumb terminals connected.