Even some of the most respected commentators in the land thought in 1997 that the internet was just a passing phase.

'Although barely more than a decade ago, the time she describes seems like another era, a forgotten world of boozy lunches and capacious expense accounts. ("We could have taught those MPs a thing or two about fiddling expenses," McAfee says, only half joking.) She thinks it is harder for us to remember relatively recent history than things that happened far longer ago. "I mean, can we imagine a world now without universal mobile phones? Can you remember trying to put coins into a call box? It wasn't so very long ago that there was no email. The changes have been so swift and they were mainly unforeseen. Even some of the most respected commentators in the land thought in 1997 that the internet was just a passing phase."'

Annalena McAfee: 'I see myself as a recovering journalist' in The Observer today.

Also, James Gleick's latest book The Information sounds interesting. It looks at the history of information, the work of Claude Shannon (maths man, came up with the term 'bit') and the state of play today with 'the torrent of data and information that now engulfs us'.


For more of that sort of thing, read The internet at 40.