What I would like to see is a central library of every recorded work. I’d like to sit down, pick pieces and compare versions, and I’d like to do this from home. One way would be via cable TV. The cable companies want to do this with movies, but that won’t be commercially viable for years. They’re aligning before the medium is ready. But with compression, the medium is ready for music right now. You could get 50 audio streams in one TV channel.
Predictor: Thompson, Ken
Prediction, in context:For a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Charles Platt interviews Unix inventor Ken Thompson about his ideas for an online music-distribution system. Platt writes: ”Ken Thompson … invented Unix, an operating system … [that] has dominated industry and academia for more than two decades and is now used worldwide on almost all hardware above the micro level … But Unix is only part of the story. Thompson has done original work in areas ranging from artificial intelligence to audio compression (his current interest) … [In 1992 he thought it would be nice] if he could sit at home and use a computer to gain easier access to music – not just a limited selection, but almost everything recorded – and to arrange it in such a way that users could browse freely through the archives … a music database on a computer, cross-indexed by artist, date, and song title. Imagine that when you click on a song, you hear it immediately, straight from your hard drive to your stereo. There’s only one snag in this scenario: Digitized music eats a huge amount of disk space. The sounds on just one CD require 600 to 700 Mbytes of storage. So Thompson looked for a way to compress music and conserve space … Using [his] system, a mono recording can be compressed by a factor of 15 to 1; even a full symphony orchestra in stereo can withstand 10-to-1 compression without a noticeable loss of quality. This means that within a couple of years, it should be possible for consumers to buy up to 15 hours worth of oldies on one CD. But this is just the beginning of some awesome possibilities. Thompson has a vision of how music compression could revolutionize our access to sounds – if the distribution system will ever allow it. ‘What I would like to see,’ he says, ‘is a central library of every recorded work. I’d like to sit down, pick pieces and compare versions, and I’d like to do this from home. One way would be via cable TV. The cable companies want to do this with movies, but that won’t be commercially viable for years. They’re aligning before the medium is ready. But with compression, the medium is ready for music right now. You could get 50 audio streams in one TV channel.’ In Thompson’s scenario, the cable box on top of your set becomes the output device for a remote music library that functions like the biggest jukebox in the universe. You select any song, old or new, and hear it immediately.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Getting, Sharing Information
Subtopic: Music
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: Music on Demand: Bell Labs’s Ken Thompson, the Father of Unix, Has Invented a New Technology that Could Mean Never Having to Buy a CD Again
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.08/thompson_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney