Symbiotic video came next on Patrick's list. That's clickable television to you and me. A coffee advertisement took us to a Web site where, you've guessed it, you could order coffee to be delivered to your door. This is an example of where e-business might be taking us and, as anyone who's looked at an IBM advert recently knows, e-business is IBM's next really big thing. Defined on their Web pages as "the transformation of key business processes through the use of Internet technologies", e-business, says Patrick, will force a new character onto the keyboard. (I don't have one, so to see what he means you'll have to look at IBM's Web site yourself, "http://www.ibm.com/") What it boils down to is businesses maximizing their potential through computers and the Web with the help, of course, of IBM.

John Patrick
John Patrick

Education is already benefiting from the Web. LEGO's high-tech programmable Mindstorms invites young engineers to submit their best designs and programs to a Web site ("http://www.legomindstorms.com/"). Mindstorms impressed Patrick so much that he felt inspired to submit his own, but was distressed to find that the "date of birth" choice only went back to 1970, so that's what he clicked. The Mindstorms design that most impressed him was posted by someone who had clicked on 1992.

Can the Internet handle all of these new big things? Yes, believes Patrick. Bandwidth is booming, and the much-touted address-space problem ­ simply running out of new addresses ­ will soon be a thing of the past. The next version of the Internet protocols will bring enough addresses for every proton, according to Patrick. "That ought to do it."

There were no surprises from Greg Papadopoulos, Chief Technology Officer at Sun Microsystems. He looks forward to the day when computers will not need to rely on complicated protocols to talk to each other and to peripheral devices. Instead, there will be just one simple protocol and it will be used for sending "objects" ­ executable programmes ­ around the Web. Coming from the company that filled our Web pages with Java applets, what else could he be expected to say? The example he gave was printing from a Web phone, a device still far from most people's everyday reality but familiar to WWW8 conference-goers. One way to do that would be to define specific high-level protocols for the purpose and standardize them. Sun's preferred route is to standardize the basic protocol for sending bytes across the network, effectively already done, and then use it to send objects to create a distributed application. The phone and the printer would then communicate through that application. Conference co-chair Murray Maloney began the closing plenary session by presenting the Yuri Rabinsky award to Richard Stallman. Rabinsky was a pioneer of the Open Software movement making Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and author of the operating system GNU (GNU's Not Unix, "http://www.gnu.org/"), an appropriate recipient and Microsoft an unlikely sponsor of the award. This was an irony not lost on Stallman who graciously accepted the award while urging vigilance against those who would patent everything. His acceptance speech, delivered by cable from California, brought to a head a sub-theme of the conference.

In the US, software can be patented and in Tim Berners-Lee's opinion, "the bar for what's patentable is far too low". As a consequence, a substantial part of W3C's energies are tied up in fighting patent applications covering things that the consortium believes should be standards. Stallman urges Europe not to succumb to American pressure to adopt software patents. "I ask everyone who is a citizen of the European Union," he said, "to take a look at the Web site 'www.freepatents.org' ." His parting shot was to urge the award committee to keep a sense of proportion. "It's more important," he said, "to keep safe from the software patents than to keep the awards rolling."

To sum up, Bob Metcalfe singled out the semantic Web of Tim Berners-Lee, whom he referred to as "The Duke of URL" (pronounced "Earl"), as the principal subject of the conference. He checked on Patrick's assertion that we are right at the beginning by calculating that just 2.5% of the world's population is currently connected to the Internet. There was also a broken illusion in store for Patrick. Metcalfe admitted that he'd visited the Mindstorms Web site, submitted a design and clicked on the 1992 button. A pundit's role is to stick his neck out, and Metcalfe is famous for doing that. Four years ago at WWW4, he predicted that the coming 12 months would see an Internet "Gigalapse"­a single network outage that would cost a billion man-hours. So confident was he that he promised to eat his words if there had not been one. Two years later, at WWW6, he took a copy of his column and ate it for all to see. The year's biggest outage had been estimated at a tenth of a Gigalapse.

Among his predictions at WWW8 was, again, the Gigalapse, but this time with no promises attached. Metcalfe also believes that microcharging is just around the corner. He surveyed his readers to find out how much they'd be prepared to pay to read his column. 0.2 cents came the reply, but, with half a million readers, he's quite happy about that. He had bad news for both Microsoft and Stallman, predicting that the former has peaked but the latter's Open Source will still never catch Mr Gates. The Internet stock bubble, he predicted, will burst on 8 November 1999.

How could he be so bold? He was recently invited to a meeting of venture capitalists and asked his opinion on this. After carefully explaining that he knew nothing of stock markets, he told them 8 November and was amused to see them all writing it down. Y2K will be a non-event. "Why?" he asked himself. "Are computers reliable?" he replied. "And anyway," he went on, "31 December is a Friday so we'll have the whole weekend to sort things out." So on that note, delegates were able to leave the conference looking forward to a restful last night of the millennium, whatever year they happen to believe that might occur.