Elon University

Subtopic: General

Digital Dreamer

Will TVs turn into PCs or vice versa? Vice versa, period … By the year 2005, he’s convinced, Americans will spend more hours on the Internet (or whatever it’s called) than watching network television. … he dreams of computers that are more like people, able to hear and see their personal users, recognize their smiles and frowns and foibles, have a sense of humor, too, and able to “converse” with all the other microchips in your house … It’s an infectiously optimistic, some would say visionary view of a world of wristwatch computers with more power than today’s desktop PCs, of personalized digital “newspapers” (the Daily Me), and fridges that don’t just notice that you’re out of milk, they remind your car to pick some up on the way home.

Here’s Where Woodstock Meets Silicon Valley

They foresee a “wired world” in which everything from books and movies to doctors’ advice and blueprints are delivered in a blend of words, images and speech on a hand-held device … The future of computing has to move beyond business and into people’s everyday lives. To do that, computers must be not only inexpensive and easier to use, responding to handwritten notes or voice commands, but also linked to faster, cheaper phone lines or by wireless transmission.

Conversations/Louis Rossetto; The View From Cyberspace: The Revolution Will Be Digitized

It’s not about one-to-many publishing any longer. In the end the digital revolution is coming from the bottom up … We’re living in a period where the future is malleable. We’ve been living in the shadow of nuclear war, the bleak sense of the future was affecting everyone. We’re trying to suggest that the future is friendly. We’re trying to say we can make a difference. Computers and networks are tools that will create better times.

Sound Bytes; Tracking High-Tech Culture

There’s a fundamental shift going on in society right now … the digital revolution is whipping through our lives like a Bengali typhoon [as Louis Rossetto said in Wired’s opening editorial]. It’s not going to go away. We’re profoundly optimistic about how we can use technology to change things. I just don’t think it’s a fad.

Inter Next World; The Medium is the Message in the Case of…

The computers and the international networks, Rossetto believes, are media with such powerful messages that in a generation, the world will be a different place. Digitally doomed are mammoth corporations, political parties, the conventional school, the commute to the workplace, orthodox finances including national budgets, and popular entertainment – your television will not screen what broadcasters provide but what its “broadcatchers” (you) choose from vastly diverse multi-media. Even the family will change. “What happens when families come back together because work is done at home?” asks Rossetto. “What neuroses will that expose?”

Prepared Statement of Leonard Kleinrock, Chairman of the NRENaissance Committee, Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, National Research Council, Before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Technology, Environment and Aviation

Continued research in networking and expansion of the research effort into areas more specific to information infrastructure are … essential and should be a federal priority. Research can contribute to architecture, to new concepts for network services, and to new principles and designs in key areas such as security, scale and evolvability. In addition, research can contribute to the lowering of the costs for implementing more general and flexible technologies.

The Information Superhighway as the Yellow Brick Road

The information superhighway, like the Yellow Brick Road, is the route we must take to reach the Information Age … Problems of communication are in fact at the heart of the economic, social, and political difficulties that a great many citizens must contend with in the impoverished communities of the United States.

Adapting ’60s Sensibilities to the Internet

Books and publishing should be a real opportunity. And all the wonderful things about the Internet can come later, but if it’s going to grow and spread further, it’s got to be a money-making business.