Imagine it's 1974 and almost 5% of all businesses finally have a minicomputer, never being able to afford a mainframe.

PDP-8 Sales:      Date	   Installations  Unfilled Orders
		Dec  1964	   0		 14
		Dec  1965	  75		302
		Dec  1966	 490		270
		Nov  1967       1010
		Dec  1968	1372
		Sept 1969	1323 (378 of which were overseas)
		May  1970	1450

Now imagine somebody told you "in a few years you'll be able to pull a small portable IBM computer out from under the bed and through an invisible network connection you'll be able to ask nearly any question in the world and receive the right answer or at least find out what experts in the field think is probably what's going on". In seconds, with better clarity and color than your TV, oh, and it will work on your phone just as well".

You'd say they were nuts and that we'll probably have access to computers by then but it would probably be for certain poeple to use, and probably at the library or something.

Our office, where we worked, and the process by which anything substantive and in force became a reflection of the physical processes of the time: sheets of paper, in file folders, filed away in cabinets. Sheets of paper exchanged with other people and with governments. Welcome to the 20th century bureaucracy of paper pushers and meetings.

We'd have meetings in court Telephone wires, analog circuits requiring things like voltage balancing to talk overseas, a complicated nightmare. Our processes were all face to face, lawmaking, innocence or guilt, were all determined by face to face processes, applying for a permit, any function, you're there or you're square.

Then, almost all of a sudden, computers. They were everywhere. Ten years later email was available for those in the know enough to be able to find it:

Email had been of great use in the development of the network for the simply fact it made communications much more efficient than any paper or phone based system before this and this rapid communication was responsible for the rapid growth and spread of technology.

In another, 6 years or so, people could type at each other in the first internet chat and technology was now in the hand or within reach of nearly everybody.

All this time, communication is becoming more effective and efficient. Paper is going away. Our daily lives are actually in some cases being made easier by computer unlike the promise of the not-so-labour-saving comptuterised cash register machines that take more time than a stoned lemur with an abacus would to compute 10 cents tax per dollar, on a bill of two dollars.

In a blink, 1993 the web, 1997 "www.example.com" was a fashion statement, and if you did't have one you weren't cool. The "com" part was as important as the "www" part and the general public didn't understand the difference.

But, most importantly our methods of communicating were evolving. The school now emailed you bus schedules. You could send and receive money at your computer. You spent more time talking to remote friends and family on the computer than on the phone or by the lost art of handwriting.

Some brave souls even worked at home on their computers. The network that was built by open collaboration now made ubiquitous free communication and collaboration possible. Real world functions, especially the most obtuse and mundane were beginning to be abandoned, if you can pull up a web page and renew your drivers license rather than stand in line at the DMV surely that's the way to go isn't it?

Communications and the way a organization collaborates is now defined by the physical processes of our tools - our PDAs, laptops and phones have replaced sheets of paper and real world meetings and one thing in common both kids and computer research scientists, and Harvard law processors is, you see them hanging out in 3d virtual worlds. You don't have to live in the net but this isn't your fathers 80 column monospaced courier font Oldsmobile either.

When ICANN had its first meeting at Harvard in 1999 it was suggested that virtual meetings could be used if deprecation of meatspace inefficiencies was a goal. Ten years later Harvard teaches classes in second life virtual world, pictured below, while ICANN still has meetings by flying all over the world every 6 days, stuffing paper into file folders and putting file folders into cabinets.