You will be able to conduct business, study, explore the world and its cultures, call up and great entertainment, make friends, attend neighborhood markets, and show pictures to distant relatives without leaving your desk or armchair. You won’t leave your network connection behind at the office or in the classroom. It will be more than an object you carry or an appliance you purchase. It will be your passport into a new, mediated way of life.
We’ll communicate with it through a variety of devices, including some that look like television sets, some like today’s PCs; some will look like telephones, and some will be the size and something like the shape of a wallet. And at the heart of each will be a powerful computer, invisibly connected to millions of theirs.
We may be about to witness the realization of Adam Smith’s ideal market, at last.
This is meant to be a serious book, although 10 years from now it may not appear that way. What I’ve said that turned out to be all right will be considered obvious and what was wrong will be humorous. I believe the course of the creation of the highway will mirror, in many ways, the history of the personal-computer industry É Everyone will be touched by the information highway, and everyone ought to be able to understand its implications.
It is crucial that a broad set of people – not just technologists or those who happen to be in the computer industry – participate in the debate about how this technology should be shaped. If that can be done, the highway will serve the purposes users want. Then it will gain broad acceptance and become a reality.
Thousands of informed and uninformed people are now speculating publicly about the information highway. The amount of misunderstanding about the technology and its possible pitfalls surprises me. Some people think the highway – also called network – is simply today’s Internet or the delivery of 500 simultaneous channels of television. Others hope or fear it will create computers as smart as human beings. Those developments will come, but they are not the highway.
The benefits and problems arising from this upcoming communications revolution will be much greater than those brought about by the PC revolution É The PC – its evolving hardware, business applications, online systems, Internet connection, electronic mail, multimedia titles, authoring tools and games Ð is the foundation for the next revolution.
The introduction of interactive television like Time Warner’s Orlando test would cost cable and telephone companies at least $1,700 per home, an investment that would take 10 to 15 years to pay back. The real focus of interactivity to the home, Forrester concludes, will be the PC and the Net. About time the rest of the world realized television is just another peripheral!
Technologists dream of a universal network, equally capable of handling voice, video, and data. This dream began its march toward reality with the development of ATM … A single standard for both voice and data promised an end to the networking Tower of Babel. The technology continues to evolve, and questions still remain, but products that support ATM are now entering the market … The technique simply divides all information, whether voice or video, into very short snippets … Despite ATM’s flexibility, or perhaps because of it, ATM will not be a panacea … But there is no doubt that ATM will be extremely important. It will be a universal language in the same way that English is.
The infobahn will not be an ancillary service, but will be central to how Americans work, learn, and communicate. It is precisely because of this centrality that we need to talk about universal service – what it should be, what it should not be, and how we can achieve it. For without a thoughtful universal-service policy, cyberspace could well end up as alien and cost-prohibitive to the general public as venturing out of town was during the reign of medieval highway robbers.