First of all, I would like to thank the author of this historical work for the opportunity to set a few matters straight. With the experience of having been born long before me, the author has assured me that, even at the turn of the millennium, it was not clear to everyone that technology would lead us to the world in which we now live. So, for anyone who thinks that the emergence of our present-day life was always obvious, I thought I'd point out some of the early works that appeared on the Web back then, describing the first crude attempts to create the most commonplace aspects of our society. These pages should be easy to access through the historical Web archive of your choice.
The Skycar: The earliest work on the skycar was done by Moller International, described at: http://www.moller.com
The Roton: The earliest work on the roton was done by HMX Inc. The roton can be found at: http://www.hmx.com/roton.html
Capability-Based Security: The author informs me that back in those days many writers based their stories on the idea that all the computers in the world would forever be easily compromised by hackers. Rubbish. As everyone knows today, the ubiquitous deployment of capability-based security abolished these concerns. A quaint introduction to these tenets is found at: http://www.communities.com/company/papers/security/
Early work on distributed, secure smart contracts and ecommerce using such security can be found at: http://www.erights.org
Idea Futures and 'castpoints: In the early days of the Web, the 'castpoints that today underpin much of the economy were considered to be forms of gambling and were outlawed. Incredible but true. To learn about the early ideas about idea futures, go to: http://hanson.berkeley.edu/ideafutures.html
To see one of the first Web implementations of an idea futures market (without money! It would have been gambling if people had used really money, right?! Such bloody foolishness), go to: http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/ListClaims
Bidirectional links, link types, filters, detectors, and other standard Web features: In the first implementation of the Web, these standard features did not exist. I know, I know, it's almost incomprehensible to imagine using the Web without bidirectional links, but that really is how our ancestors worked. Imagine what remarkable people they must have been, to achieve so much with such crude and primitive tools. To see early ruminations about how hypertext might work with these standard features, go to: http://www.skyhunter.com/hyper.htm
To see some of the first experiments in upgrading the Web to support these features, go to: http://crit.org/index.html
If you have trouble finding any of these pages in your Web archive, to find other pointers go to: http://www.the-earthweb.com