I got a note today from a colleague at IBM Ecuador; he’s going to be making a presentation to a university next week about the Internet and Open Source, and while he was researching it, he stumbled across one of my old presentations and was wondering if I had a current version. I didn’t, but rereading it amused me enough that I thought I’d post it here.

So here is The Internet — Past, Present, and Future, as delivered to the American Intellectual Property Law Association in 1996 (with two changes: I’ve removed my e-mail address, and I’ve converted the presentation from Lotus Freelance Graphics to PDF; somehow, I think more people can read PDF these days than can deal with Freelance).

Today was Day 2 (and last) of the 2006 Almaden Institute. I avoided the talks which looked as though they were grounded in deep neuroscience and biology — that left me two to attend.

The first was Beyond Dualism by John Searle of Berkeley. He talked about consciousness, free will, free won’t, intentionality, and subjectiveness — and that was in the first ten minutes. But, even though the talk spent most of its time in deep philosophical waters, I didn’t feel adrift.

And then I returned for the last talk of the day, on Consciousness by Kristof Koch of Caltech. This talk had demos, humor, and raised some interesting questions.

I stayed for part of the closing panel, but my phone rang and, after leaving the auditorium to answer it, I didn’t feel like returning for the last few minutes.

Instead, I went home for dinner and then a quick cache; I had hoped to be first-to-find it, but viperfin beat us by 17 minutes. There were two other brand new caches in the vicinity, but I hadn’t written down the details of either one, so they’ll have to wait.