"And so the idea was, well maybe you can take an Atari video game machine, where people plug in a game cartridge, and plug in a modem, and tie that into a telephone, and essentially turn that game in the machine into an interactive terminal"
About this Quote
The future arrives here not as a thunderclap but as a jury-rigged accessory: an Atari, a modem, a phone line, and a slightly heretical premise that a toy could masquerade as infrastructure. Steve Case is describing an improvisation mindset that defined early consumer tech, when the big insight wasn’t a polished product so much as a reclassification of everyday objects. An “interactive terminal” sounds like corporate-speak now, but in this context it’s a kind of dare: take a machine built for play and smuggle it into the world of communication.
The intent is pragmatic evangelism. Case isn’t waxing poetic about cyberspace; he’s walking you through the hack that makes the pitch legible to normal people and fundable to skeptics. Plug in this, tie in that. The syntax mimics assembly instructions, which is the point: the internet’s mass adoption wasn’t inevitable, it was assembled from parts already sitting in the living room.
The subtext is class and access. By starting with Atari, Case signals a democratizing strategy: don’t ask households to buy a computer (expensive, intimidating, culturally “for engineers”). Ask them to repurpose something familiar. It’s also a telling admission about the era’s constraints. The phone network is the only ubiquitous “data pipe,” so the dream has to ride on Bell-era copper and the social permission to occupy it.
In the background sits a whole business thesis: distribution beats elegance. If you can make connectivity feel like an add-on to entertainment, you don’t just invent a service; you invent a habit.
The intent is pragmatic evangelism. Case isn’t waxing poetic about cyberspace; he’s walking you through the hack that makes the pitch legible to normal people and fundable to skeptics. Plug in this, tie in that. The syntax mimics assembly instructions, which is the point: the internet’s mass adoption wasn’t inevitable, it was assembled from parts already sitting in the living room.
The subtext is class and access. By starting with Atari, Case signals a democratizing strategy: don’t ask households to buy a computer (expensive, intimidating, culturally “for engineers”). Ask them to repurpose something familiar. It’s also a telling admission about the era’s constraints. The phone network is the only ubiquitous “data pipe,” so the dream has to ride on Bell-era copper and the social permission to occupy it.
In the background sits a whole business thesis: distribution beats elegance. If you can make connectivity feel like an add-on to entertainment, you don’t just invent a service; you invent a habit.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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