The link of TCI to MicroUnity and to Tiger offers the best promise of an information infrastructure over the next five years, affording a potential increase in bandwidth of 250,000-fold over the current four-kilohertz telephone wires.
We can imagine a network with a range of PC-sized nodes costing between $500 and $5,000 that provides person-to-person communication, television and when used together (including in parallel), an arbitrarily large computer … This architecture will drive out most other computer structures such as massively parallel computers, low-priced workstations and all but a few special-purpose processors. This doomsday for hardware manufacturers will arrive before the next two generations of computer hardware play out at the end of the decade. But it will be ideal for users.
In an era when the network advances faster than the CPU, it is more likely that communications processors will gradually “suck in” and “hollow out” the functions of the CPU, rather than the other way around. Echoing Sun’s perennial slogan, Eric Schmidt predicts that the network will become the computer. In this era, Moore’s Law and the law of the microcosm are no longer the driving force of progress in information technology. Bandwidth is king.
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.
In a world of bandwidth abundance, specialized, hard-wired processing will be mostly unnecessary … The new world of the telecosm offers no rest for weary microchip magnates or future-shocked PC producers. Driven by the new demands of video and multimedia, the pace of advance will now accelerate sharply rather than slow down.
The new explosions of bandwidth enable interactive multimedia and video, riding on radio frequencies, into every household …If the personal computer cannot handle these streams … the huge promise of the PC industry, with its richness of productivity tools and cultural benefits, could give way to an incoherent babel of toys, videophones and 3D games.
Just as containerization revolutionized the transport business, ATM is revolutionizing communications.
The tide is now gathering toward a crest … it will be possible to carry 2.4 gigahertz (billions of cycles per second) on each wavelength stream. That would add up to more than 1,700 gigahertz on every fiber thread.
The dribble of kilobits (thousands of bits) from twisted-pair telephone lines is about to become a firehose of gigabits (billions of bits). But the PC is not ready. Attach the firehose to the parallel port of your personal computer and the stream of bits becomes a blast of data smithereens.
If you are amazed by the fast drop in the cost of computing power over the last decade, just wait till you see what is happening to the cost of bandwidth.