The Network of All Networks
General-purpose users may eventually outnumber the computer experts who now dominate the system, and they are gaining access in rapid numbers.
General-purpose users may eventually outnumber the computer experts who now dominate the system, and they are gaining access in rapid numbers.
With the ability to mix sound, text and video, newspapers and TV news programs would evolve into richer, multimedia presentations.
With HDTV and high-quality sound flowing easily over the NII, home recreation would take a different form … vendors would offer music and video rentals over the NII. Not only would this system be cheaper for individuals … but it would also bring to our ears and eyes an entertainment library thousands if not millions of times richer than any we might own. Artists, too, would be more fairly compensated for their creations, having royalties credited to them automatically.
The NII would make practical another kind of national treasure – a digital library of active knowledge that would combine text, sound and video in interactive formats.
A knowbot might respond to an instruction like “Find and display a good night-time picture of the Eiffel Tower 3” or “Play back the five most popular songs recorded by the Beatles.” The knowbot would “travel” over the network, enter several computers it knows to contain this information, search around each using its syntax and conventions, combine the gleanings from these data sources into a single response and translate it into a format understood by the user’s computer.
We have all the evidence we need that as soon as you charge by the transaction you drive the [academic] user away.
In a decade electronic publications will be worth $1 billion a year in sales. Most of this will be distributed on various forms of compact disk read-only memory – CD-ROM, CD-I and so forth – and will be entertainment, education and home reference.
In the future, Physics Abstracts will be a service which tells you in the morning which of the papers published overnight match a set of keywords which you have specified. You’ll be able to ask for reverse citations – all the later papers which reference the one you’re reading – and go directly to read them. And you could see the citation count, and the readership count, change day-by-day. Such tools will be the only way to keep up with the flood of information.
She doubt[s] that the electronic research communities will be any harder [for women] to break into than non-electronic ones. “Based on my own experience, I expect they will be much easier to join.”
Source credibility will vary on the Internet, with commercial media sites carrying relatively more credibility and unknown sources carrying less. A much greater burden will be placed on the user to determine how much faith to put in any given source.