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Name: Andrew Hale
From: California
Bio: 38 Yrs aero space SW engineer
Area of Expertise: Technology Developer/Administrator
Topic: General, Overarching Remarks
Headline: Infoculture is here and most are still looking for it to arrive
Nutshell: It is ubiquitously massively integrated into all facets of our lives and economy, with immense computational, storage, and communications capacity, with social policy and privacy concerns imposing constraints on potential technical, economic, and social applications.
Vision:We project the future in linear terms of where we currently stand, while the future evolves at an exponential rate.
It is November 11, 2004, and I am almost 63 years old.
My experiences with computers started in college in 1965 with an IBM 1620 computer with 16 kilobytes of memory, and a memory speed measured in milliseconds using punched cards and no disk or tape storage.
We had no electronic calculators, just slide rules. In the optics lab I used an abacus to add and subtract 10-place logarithms for calculations because it was faster than the Frieden electro-mechanical calculator.
In the late 1960’s, I used CALL 360, the IBM time-sharing service, with a Model 33 Teletype, with a 300- baud telecommunications link. My backup was punched-paper tape.
In the early 1970’s I did a study to determine what type of computers would available for use on the Space Shuttle. Many of my co-workers laughed when I told them that they would be smaller than a deck of cards.
My PC now has a gigabyte of memory, two 80-gigabyte disks, and communicates at hundreds of thousands of bytes per second.
We have now found a way to transmit single photons in the lab. We have been making advances that hint that quantum computing devices are not only possible, but probable.
The Egyptian hieroglyphic for a million was a man standing, arms stretched over his head with a look of amazement on his face.
As I stand looking up at the mountain of the future, I feel like that man. I know what I see, but my intellect assures me that I am wrong. I am looking far too low on the mountain.
I helped put men on the moon and worked on the International Space Station, but I still think linearly and our world expands exponentially. Like that ancient Egyptian I am both scared and fascinated by what I think I might see.
The true effects of the advances in the internet will come, not like a clap of thunder, but rather like spring in a high meadow. We will look out the window one morning and realize that it is here.
Our greatest challenges will be the social, economic, and political situations.
I read once that the difference between a problem and a situation was that a problem has a logical solution.
Date Submitted: November 12, 2004
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