Having been an observer of the Internet from near the beginning, I’ve been able to watch most of its evolution. I know I missed some things — I didn’t work for the DOD or do research at a major university in the pre-Web days — but by and large I have a certain scope when it comes to the online world.

Although the Internet has evolved significantly and is quite certainly a mature medium, I wonder whether it’s truly arrived or whether there’s much room for more growth.

The question is, perhaps, whether the Internet still holds some serious surprises. The answer is: undoubtedly.

If we look at the history of television, for instance, we go from some fuzzy black-and-white images to an evolving set of entertainments and the expansion of TV news and on into the change to color and the eventual ubiquity of color sets, with one in almost every room.

That’s an impressive history over a period of roughly sixty years, and that’s not taking into account other significant breakthroughs, such as the explosion of the UHF stations in the seventies (remember that?), the emergence of HBO (wow!), and the later continuing expansion of cable stations.

Now we can honestly say that TV may not have many surprises left and may be in for a possible contraction, not taking into account how technologies like the VCR, satellite TV, and DVRs like TiVo and Windows Media Center might have changed our viewing habits if not the medium of TV itself.

Television may have a future role to play in delivering movies and actual product, with DVRs incorporating disc burners and such. Still, that’s another hardware device rather than a further evolution of television. But I’m quibbling.

With the Internet, we’ve got a more complex picture to evaluate. AltaVista, Yahoo! and, later, Google have revolutionized the way we seek out information, along with a number of sites that serve up that information, such as Wikipedia, Information Please, FactMonster and a host of educational and general informational sites.

Heaven knows Amazon.com had the model right when it came to online shopping, eBay knocked it out of the park with online auctions, and a little ole bulletin board service in San Francisco called craigslist has gone international and may single-handedly—at least more than any other single site — destroy the classified ad revenue stream that local newspapers survived and even thrived on for decades.

Let’s not, too, forget the impact online brokerages played in changing, for better or worse, the investment landscape of the U.S., with more and more everyday people getting into the stock market and beginning to manage their own financial lives.

Yahoo! Finance gets kudos as the epitome of financial research sites and remains at the top of the list today.

Apple’s iTunes is an overwhelming success, possibly dealing a death blow to both the CD and the very concept of the “album.” Could the same thing happen to the DVD, at least factory-manufactured ones?

I’ve almost forgotten one big change the Internet has brought: VoIP telephony. I’ve been using an Internet-based telephone service exclusively for the better part of a year, with perfectly satisfactory results.

Is the Internet fully mature, or is there a lot on the horizon?

Next week, let’s peer into the future to guess what’s coming.