One way to try to bound what we can expect from future technologies is to look back over a comparable period of time. For example, let’s take a person from 1980 and magically project that person to today. She would be able to get right in any automobile and drive right off. She could go to the airport and board a flight and not be particularly surprised at anything that she saw. She could turn on the TV and see new shows and characters but it would pretty much be the same old garbage she saw in 1980. The point is that over a span of twenty years a lot of things just don’t change in fundamentally significant ways. The improvements are definitely occurring but happen very gradually. One way to visualize this is as a series of technology rockets that don’t fly too high and don’t shine especially bright but they continue to lead us forward.
	However, once in a while a technology rocket is fired off that really is bigger and brighter. Even though the seeds of today’s Internet were solidly in place in 1980 through the ARPANet effort, our visitor from 1980 would probably be truly amazed if someone showed her how they use email on a daily basis. If you then opened your web browser and let this 1980 person surf the web for a while I think she would simply find it hard to believe the depth and breath of information from all over the world available at her fingertips. Although XML is still in the process of solidifying as a true force on the Internet, I am confident that it represents another of these technologies that will significantly change the way we work with information in the future. Finally, an emerging concept, called the Semantic Web, is poised to create a truly major leap forward that will forever change  how we interact with the web of the future.