What Does a Nobel Prize for Radio Astronomy Have to Do with Your Telephone? It’s Been a Decade Since the Break-up of AT&T. Has the Spirit Passed Out of its Bell Labs, as Some Charge? Or is it Still the Preeminent Technology Lab in the U.S.? | Imagining the Internet

The prediction, in brief:

We can download new codes to older machines. This process is a critical component for … the network-driven “software delivery model of the future.” It will allow millions of customers to “hook into the intelligence of the network.”

Predictor: Sumner, Eric

Prediction, in context:

In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Richard Rapaport goes to visit AT&T’s Bell Labs research scientists and administrators, interviewing Eric Sumner, AT&T’s product development vice president for intelligent systems. Rapaport writes:”The TV Information Center is a new AT&T service introduced in January 1995. It is designed to provide onscreen messaging; rudimentary weather; stock, news, or traffic information; but not, Sumner hastens to add, visual phone service. With the push of a button, the TV Information Center can record, store, and then visually render telephone messages or faxes; it can be programmed to automatically dial up and store voice and text services; it can give an instant readout on all the day’s relevant stats – before you’ve even brewed your morning coffee, something it cannot do. The Information Center’s simplicity – you plug a black box into a phone jack and then into your television – is hardly accidental. Technological ‘ease of use,’ to borrow the jargon, is a major, perhaps the major, new Bell Labs paradigm … it will allow the software in AT&T devices to be automatically upgraded over telephone lines by modem. ‘We can download new codes to older machines,’ Sumner points out. ‘It’s nice for consumers that Information Center boxes are less likely to become obsolete.’ This process is a critical component for what Sumner sees as the network-driven ‘software delivery model of the future.’ He believes it will allow millions of customers to ‘hook into the intelligence of the network.'”

Date of prediction: January 1, 1995

Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure

Subtopic: Language/Interface/Software

Name of publication: Wired

Title, headline, chapter name: What Does a Nobel Prize for Radio Astronomy Have to Do with Your Telephone? It’s Been a Decade Since the Break-up of AT&T. Has the Spirit Passed Out of its Bell Labs, as Some Charge? Or is it Still the Preeminent Technology Lab in the U.S.?

Quote Type: Partial quote

Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.04/bell.labs_pr.html

This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney