Craig Mundie of Microsoft thinks that Tiger, his video-on-demand operating system, signals a fundamental shift in the computer industry. Ruling the new era will be bandwidth measured in billions of bits per second rather than in the millions of instructions per second of current computers. “We’ll have infinite bandwidth in a decade’s time.”Bill Gates, PC Magazine, Oct. 11, 1994. Andrew Grove, Titan of Intel, is widely known for his belief, born in the vortex of the Hungarian Revolution and honed in the trenches of Silicon Valley, that “only the paranoid survive.” If so, the Intel chief may soon need to resharpen the edges of fear that have driven his company to the top. Looming on the horizons of the global computer industry that Grove now …
Imagine it is 1971 and you are chair of the new Federal Computer Commission. This commission has been established to regulate the natural monopoly of computer technology as summed up in the famous Grosch’s Law. In 1956 IBM engineer Herbert Grosch proved that computer power rises by the square of its cost and thus necessarily gravitates to the most costly machines. According to a famous IBM projection, the entire world could use some 55 mainframes, time-sharing from dumb terminals and keypunch machines. The owners of these machines would rule the world of information in an ascendant information age. By the Orwellian dawn of 1984, Big Bre’r IBM would establish a new digital tyranny, with a new elite of the data-rich dominating the data-poor. As head of the computer …
In 1994, four years after I wrote the first edition of Life After Television, the cornucopian afterlife is indeed at hand. With microchips and fiber optics eroding the logic of centralized institutions, networks of personal computers are indeed overthrowing IBM and CBS, NTT and EEC. But as the great pyramids of the broadcast and industrial eras — the familiar masters of the American immigration — break apart, new fear and anxieties arise about the future. If the center cannot hold, what rough beast, shuffling its slow thighs, slouches toward Hollywood to be born again in gigabytes — and gigadollars — on the information superhighway? Will life after television mean the dissolution of the American hearth into a pornucopia of 900-number videos, full-color cold calls from …
Media Mirror on the Wall, Who's the Fairest of Us All?
George Gilder
October 1, 1993
The perennial question of all suitors of fate and fortune now whispers and resounds through conference resorts, executive retreats and consulting sessions across the land as business leaders from Hollywood to Wall Street pose with pundits and ponder the new world of converging technologies. Symbolized in a famous mandala by MIT’s Media Lab, this grand fondue of information tools — to be served la carte on a flat-panel screen — is foreseen to be a $3.5 trillion feast for American business sometime early next century. Few would guess that crucial to the emerging mediamorphosis — as king of the flat panel — will be a slight, graying, bearded man with some 30 teddy bears, Roger Fidler. Fidler coined the term mediamorphosis as the title of his forthcoming book. His office in …
The world of networks breaks into two polar paradigms. Most familiar is the Public Switched Telephone Network. From the tiniest transistor flip-flop on a modem chip through labyrinthine layers of rising complexity on up to a 4ESS supercomputer switch linking 107,520 telephone trunk lines (itself consisting of millions of interconnected transistors), the public network is a vast, deterministic web of wires and switches. Once you are connected in the public network, your message is guaranteed to get through. In the public network, bandwidth constantly expands as you rise in the hierarchy. At the bottom are the twisted-pair copper wires of your telephone that function at four kilohertz (thousands of cycles per second). At the top are fiber-optic trunk lines that function at rates close …
In the spring of 1989 when Michael Bookey first visited the Middle School in Issaquah, Wash., to help the school system with its computers, he was reminded of his early ventures into Communist China. After 20 years of working with computer networks, to enter Issaquah seemed to me like encountering an exotic tribe of primitives untouched by the modern world. The only sign of modern technology was a forlorn computer room full of Radio Shack TRS-80 machines, most of which had broken down. Then he learned that as a remedy for this problem, the district had recently voted a levy of $2.7 million for outlays on high technology. Lacking any better ideas, the school system had decided to distribute the money equally among the teachers, to spend as they wanted. What they wanted turned out to …
At first glance, Vahak Hovnanian, a homebuilding tycoon in New Jersey, would seem an unlikely sort to be chasing rainbows. Yet in the converging realms of computers and communications that we call the telecosm, rainbows are less a matter of hue and weather than they are a metaphor for electromagnetism: the spectrum of wavelengths and frequencies used to build businesses in the Information Age. An Armenian Christian from Iraq, Hovnanian ran a business building high-quality “affordable” housing. His first coup came on Labor Day in 1958 when, together with his three older brothers, he bought an apparently undesirable property near the waterfront in Tom’s River for $20,000. From this modest beginning has arisen not only one of the nation’s largest homebuilding …
In a world of dumb terminals and telephones, networks had to be smart. But in a world of smart terminals, networks have to be dumb. Philip Hope, divisional vice president for engineering systems of EDS, has an IQ problem. His chief client and owner, General Motors, wants to interconnect thousands of 3-D graphics and computer aided engineering (CAE) workstations with mainframes and supercomputers at Headquarters, with automated assembly equipment at factories in Lordstown, Indiana, and Detroit, with other powerful processors at their technical center in Warren, Michigan, with their Opel plant in Ruesselheim, Germany, and with their design center outside San Diego. On behalf of another client, Hope wants to link multimedia stations for remote diagnostics, X-ray analysis, and …
