A Merger of Giants: The Vision; A Phone-Cable Vehicle for the Data Superhighway

If the synergy between cable and telephone is real, some believe it will shift the center of technology innovation away from the personal computer business. Mr. Ellison, Oracle’s chairman, in particular argues that growth in the future will not be in stand-alone personal computers, but instead in the television set-top boxes and in hand-held information and communications devices that will connect wirelessly to the information highway. Mr. Ellison is also betting that there will be a boom in demand for supercomputers, which will act as the information servers for the powerful new networks. These machines will provide the raw computing horsepower to deliver simultaneously thousands of movies or other items from electronic data bases.

A Merger of Giants: The Vision; A Phone-Cable Vehicle for the Data Superhighway

“Dialing” itself, in fact, is likely to be a vastly different experience when such services arrive in the next century. Rather than pecking at numbers on a telephone keypad, it is likely that a telephone caller will simply use a remote control to point at an icon on the television screen. The call might be audio only, or it could include full-motion video, if the two – or more – parties agree.

A Merger of Giants: The Vision; A Phone-Cable Vehicle for the Data Superhighway

The truly successful new information services, some experts say, may go beyond traditional television programming and consumerism. “It’s very easy to envisage a time when video communication will be the most natural way to communicate,” said Nathan Myhrvold, a senior vice president at the Microsoft Corporation, who is in charge of developing the software company’s interactive television business. What will be possible when “video dial tone” is widely available in every American home? For one thing, some industry executives predict, there will be a proliferation of video cameras throughout society, permitting people to dial into the network and peek virtually everywhere.

A Merger of Giants: The Vision; A Phone-Cable Vehicle for the Data Superhighway

Cable industry entrepreneur John C. Malone held out the vision of a single powerful box on top of each home television set that would combine the diverse streams of information that now flow separately into the home: telephone calls, television shows, video rentals, newspapers and even books. If the vaunted information superhighway is coming, this set-top device will be the steering wheel, combining the video controls of a cable converter box, the two-way capabilities of a telephone and the information-processing power of a personal computer. In short, “it will allow us to control all the communications needs of a household with one device,” Mr. Malone said.

A Free and Simple Computer Link

Browsing represents a form of advertising that is noninvasive and that seems to fit well with the culture of the Internet, whose users tend to be easily infuriated by electronic junk mail. “I’m convinced that very quickly we’ll have a new Madison Avenue kind of industry devoted to this style of advertising,” said Tony Rutkowski.

A Free and Simple Computer Link

So sudden and dramatic has been Mosaic’s success in attracting commercial software developers that the program may play a decisive role in determining the shape of the national “information infrastructure” now being debated by Government officials and telecommunications and computer executives … [Mitchell Kapor] sees it as a tool in his crusade to cajole the telephone, cable television and computer industries to establish an open and accessible national data highway rather than a private toll road that many of the private companies seem to prefer. “For me Mosaic was a turning point,” Mr. Kapor said. “It’s like -C-Span for everyone.”

A Free and Simple Computer Link

A new software program available free to companies and individuals is helping even novice computer users find their way around the global Internet, the network of networks that is rich in information but can be baffling to navigate. Since its introduction earlier this year, the program, called Mosaic, has grown so popular that its use is causing data traffic jams on the Internet. That worries some computer scientists. But Mosaic’s many passionate proponents hail it as the first “killer app” of network computing – an applications program so different and so obviously useful that it can create a new industry from scratch. “Mosaic has given me a sense of limitless opportunity, which is the reason that I went into computer science in the first place,” said Brian Reid.

For Shakespeare, Just Log On

“Information retrieval technology is starting to spread from supercomputers all the way down to personal computers,” said Brewster Kahle … In the future, a special directory or “white pages” will keep an up-to-date list of all the separate sources on the network.

For Shakespeare, Just Log On

Mitchell Kapor, the founder of the Lotus Development Corporation, predicts the growth of a new industry as significant as the personal computer business.