Ruling the new era will be bandwidth or communications power, measured in billions of bits per second rather than in the millions of instructions per second of current computers. The telecosmic shift from mips to bandwidth, from storage-oriented computing to communications processing, will change the entire structure of information technology … The network becomes the bus and any set of interconnected processors and memories can become a computer regardless of their location.
Predictor: Gilder, George
Prediction, in context:In a 1994 article he wrote for Forbes ASAP titled “The Bandwidth Tidal Wave,” George Gilder looks at the technology involved in the networking revolution. The article is a portion of his 1996 book “Telecosm.” Gilder writes: ”Ruling the new era will be bandwidth or communications power, measured in billions of bits per second rather than in the millions of instructions per second of current computers. The telecosmic shift from mips to bandwidth, from storage-oriented computing to communications processing, will change the entire structure of information technology. In the past, the industry has been driven by increases in computer power embodied in new generations of microprocessors … Under this regime, the processor is king and Moore’s Law dictates the pace of change. In the age of the telecosm, however, all these rules collapse. When the network increasingly runs faster than the processors and buses in the PC, the computer ‘hollows out,’ in the words of Eric Schmidt. The network becomes the bus and any set of interconnected processors and memories can become a computer regardless of their location. In this bandwidth-driven world, the key chips are communications processors, such as digital signal processors (DSPs) and MicroUnity’s mediaprocessors, which must function at the pace of the network firehose rather than at the pace of the Pentium.”
Biography:George Gilder was a pioneer the formulation of the theory of supply-side economics. In his major book “Microcosm” (1989), he explored the quantum roots of the new electronic technologies. His book “Life After Television,” published by W.W. Norton (1992), is a prophecy of computers and telecommunications displacing the broadcast-TV empire. He followed it with another classic, “Telecosm.” (Futurist/Consultant.)
Date of prediction: January 1, 1994
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Pipeline/Switching/Hardware
Name of publication: Forbes ASAP
Title, headline, chapter name: The Bandwidth Tidal Wave
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~gaj1/bandgg.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney