High-speed communications may someday become affordable to everyone. But until then, the information infrastructure must offer a wide range of transmission capacities, or bandwidths, to meet widely varying requirements. Users should pay only for the bandwidth they need.
Predictor: Dertouzos, Michael
Prediction, in context:In a 1991 article for Technology Review, MIT researcher/administrator Michael Dertouzos writes: ”High-speed communications may someday become affordable to everyone. But until then, the information infrastructure must offer a wide range of transmission capacities, or bandwidths, to meet widely varying requirements. Users should pay only for the bandwidth they need; they may not want to pay for a billion-character-per-second service to send text messages. Bandwidth would be just one of several ‘levers’ that the NII’s [National Information Infrastructure’s] human or computer users could adjust to suit their needs. Another lever would control the reliability of transporting information. Shipping photographs of wheat fields from across the nation to a server computer that forecasts total wheat production could be effective even if a small portion of the data representing these pictures (say, less than 1 percent) were lost. Such an error, however, would be devastating in transmitting financial data, software or circuit diagrams … A third lever of the NII would control security. Senders of legal contracts, sales bids and new product designs would be able to tell the NII to scramble their messages to ensure privacy. Weather data, on the other hand, might be communicated in the clear, and hence at a lower cost. Client computers on the NII would then select the levels of bandwidth, reliability and security they require, at a cost that would be directly determined by these choices. This is the meaning of flexible transport.”
Biography:Michael Dertouzos was director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science and the author of “The Unfinished Revolution.” He led a project intended to make computers adapt to people. He outlined a comprehensive proposal for a national information “infrastructure” in a 1991 article for Technology Review. (Research Scientist/Illuminator.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1991
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Bandwidth
Name of publication: Technology Review
Title, headline, chapter name: Building the Information Marketplace
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://web2.infortrac.galegroup.com/itw/infomark/599/939/33335311w2/purl=rcl
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney