I’ve watched the Internet grow from its beginning … I would never have imagined that 20 years later we’d have such a plethora of different network technologies. Even more astonishing is the enormous number of independently managed but nonetheless interconnected networks that make up the current network. And somewhat beyond comprehension is that it seems to work.
The country is currently breaking into a brand new realm of communications and, at the Trends Research Institute, we are predicting a major “techno boost” in the next three to five years.
We are moving out of the industrial age into a technological global age … The institutions that were developed during the industrial age – health care, businesses, politics, education, religion – are all restructuring. People are not focusing on this, even though it is a worldwide phenomenon. This transition period is going to be difficult for those who don’t recognize the nature and dynamics of the change.
As computers become cheaper and we learn more about harnessing them in our cooperative work, they will come to support an increasing number of different domains of knowledge work. Moreover, the sphere of computer-supported activity within each domain will steadily expand as more functions and more skills become employed … WYSIWYG will give way to WYSIWYN – “what you see is what you need (at the moment).”
[1992 will be remembered as the year most people will want to forget because Americans] will be jolted into the realization that the institutions and experiments of the industrial age are ill-equipped to meet the demands of the emerging global age.
There is real concern that the Internet, which is subject to applications with much wider intrinsic variation in normal usage, will not remain stable in the future.
The NII would make possible a United States where business mail would routinely reach its destination in five seconds instead of five days; where advertising could be done in reverse, with consumers broadcasting needs to suppliers; where goods could be ordered and paid for electronically; where a retired engineer in Florida could teach high school algebra to a bunch of students in New York City; where a parent could deliver office work to a distant employer while taking care of young children at home; where you might enjoy from your easy chair your choice of a high-definition video movie from the millions produced; where national treasures like the National Gallery could be explored at your own pace and with your interests in mind … and on the list goes, limited only by our imagination.
Draft notes, e-mail, plans, source code, to-do lists, what have you – all can be hyperdocument pieces, instantly and intrinsically linkable, and with work processes involving fewer and fewer hard-copy printouts.
Text, pictures, movies, software, designs and much more would move easily and rapidly over this substrate. By speeding up many to today’s tasks and making possible an almost unlimited number of new activities, this infrastructure should improve our economy and our way of life.
Computers will become a truly useful part of our society only when they are linked by an infrastructure like the highway system and the electric power grid, creating a new kind of free market for information services. Imagine the United States without its highways. Our millions of cars, buses and trucks would be driven in our own back yards and neighborhood parking lots, with occasional forays by the daring few along the uncharted, unpredictable and treacherous dirt roads, full of unspeakable terrors. A ridiculous picture? Perhaps, but it is not far off the mark if we are talking not about transportation but about today’s computers and the exchange of information among them.