There’s amazing footage of storms off Cape Horn, as well as less stressful footage of daily life on board one of the last commercial sailing ships: no engines, no electricity, no hydraulics, no GPS, no radio (except, probably, a short range Morse-code rig). Oil lamps and a hand-cranked foghorn. Over an acre of sails were controlled by a crew of dozens of young men swarming up and down her four masts, up to 170 feet above the sea. Four hours on, four hours off, for a hundred days. Lousy food and worse sanitation.

All this within living memory. Of course, my first reaction was admiration for the strength and endurance of the crew. But then I began to think about all the skills required by the underlying technology base that permitted three dozen men to transport three tons of cargo around the world using wind, muscle power, and ingenuity. How almost every item and every task on board would have been instantly familiar to Lord Nelson after Trafalgar in 1805.

And about how all of those skills have been lost within one human lifetime.

I’m exaggerating. I suppose the skills aren’t really “lost.” There are plenty of books, and journals, and even courses on the Age of Sail. But these are intellectual curiosities. We no longer have an industrial base whereby thousands of sailors, and tens of thousands of at-shore workers, rely on commercial sailing ships. So, of course, as far as the job market is concerned, the skills have been lost.

It’s true in every field. No one other than historical re-enactors knows how to make a buggy whip. Or a suit of armor. Or a flint knife. Heck, just ask any office worker of a certain age for a sheet of carbon paper! (My mom typed the board minutes of the Trust Company of Georgia, now SunTrust, every month. Twelve copies, eleven sheets of carbon paper. As you can imagine, she learned to type very accurately without touching the backspace key!)

Those aren’t commercially-useful skills anymore. So we don’t learn them, and we don’t teach them.

What do we teach? Look at the last resume that crossed your desk. It probably has a line saying something like “Proficient in Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.” You can get a degree from Harvard with your sole “quantitative reasoning” class being “Practical Math,” which appears to be a review of basic arithmetic plus tips for using Microsoft Excel.

Does anyone really believe that Microsoft Excel will be a core skill set in forty years? Twenty years? It’d be like telling the first mate on a modern merchant marine ship that you know how to repair a canvas sail by hand.

But, like sailing a barque around Cape Horn by hand, what have we lost? I used to know how to do basic car maintenance. Changed my own oil. Changed fan belts. Changed plugs, points, and condensers. This isn’t special; probably every American male born in the Fifties and early Sixties learned the same. Now, I open the hood of a modern automobile and am baffled by the complexity. So I take it to the dealer, who has $15,000 worth of computer equipment to diagnose its ills. We’re probably not far from the day when, like your iPhone, your car requires special tools just to open the hood.

I’m pretty much the opposite of a Luddite. I think that, in general, new technology makes our lives better… and that when technology has unpleasant consequences (like pollution), the answer is usually more technology, not less. But watching this video, my mind filled in a Jimmy Buffett soundtrack… “Watched the men who rode you switch from sails to steam.” And I wonder if we’ve lost something worth keeping?

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Car and Driver is the latest enthusiast rag to hop onto the hydrogen bandwagon with their article “What the H?” in this month’s issue. I wrote this letter to the editor but, since I doubt it will be printed, I’m reproducing it here.

Editors,

I’m sorry to see that you’ve bought into the hydrogen hype (“What the H”, Jan 2012). Hydrogen fuel cells make for nice demonstration projects, but will never be a meaningful part of the national transportation infrastructure.

Why? First, there are no hydrogen wells. You have to create it, whether from water electrolysis, biomass gasification, or natural gas reformation. According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that’s always going to take significantly more energy than you get out of burning it in a fuel cell. In this sense, hydrogen is just a bulky, expensive, and occasionally-dangerous battery.

Second, hydrogen is incredibly hard to work with. It can’t be transported or stored easily. Standard tools, fittings, tanks, and materials become brittle or leaky. Yes, aerospace companies have solved these problems for rocket engines, but not with parts you can buy at Pep Boys.

Finally, hydrogen is the opposite of dense. Whether as a liquid or a pressurized gas, a hydrogen tank contains only a fraction of the potential energy represented by an equal-size tank filled with liquid hydrocarbons. That’s a fundamental physical limit, and can’t be improved by smart engineering.

If you want to burn hydrogen in your car, the best way is to attach your hydrogen atoms to carbon atoms… and make gasoline.

Thanks for the otherwise-great issue!

Stephen

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Last Tuesday, September 20th, the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA) and Numerex invited me to address the Second International M2M Standardization Meeting as the keynote speaker for their dinner at the Carter Center. I didn’t know anything about M2M, but that’s never stopped me from speaking before! So I started doing a little research, and this was the result.

Thanks for having me here tonight. I was asked to come speak about M2M communications. My first reaction was “what’s M2M”? I hadn’t heard the acronym before…

But once Alain educated me, I realized I’d actually been working on M2M for a long time.

I’ve had a few careers, but I started out in the telecommunications business… originally at Bell Laboratories, back when that meant something, and then at Nortel, back when that was a great company. In about 1985, I was teaching classes to Illinois Bell in something called “TBOS”. Anybody here ever heard of it?

Nope.

TBOS: Telemetry Byte Oriented Serial. It was a primitive method for taking contact closure alarms — relays — and remoting them to a centralized monitoring center. It was invented by the old Bell System, and Nortel implemented it in our optical fiber systems. So here I was, 23 years old, in a classroom in Chicago, teaching a class to a bunch of old phone company guys.

And here I am teaching them about TBOS. This is Illinois, so they were heavily unionized. And they’re not looking too excited.

I finally asked one of them what the problem was. He replied: “You’re saying how amazing this technology is, and how you’re able to centralize alarm monitoring at one location, and how we won’t need to have individual technicians at each office to monitor alarms. Well, that’s MY job, and you’re saying they won’t need me anymore.”

Ouch.

So way back in the dawn of time, I not only tripped over M2M, I tripped over some of the business and financial and personal impacts of M2M.

So then I went off and joined a startup company that turned out to be in the M2M space, even though we didn’t call it that… We were building something called SCADA… Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition. We sold that into the electrical power utilities, giving them telemetry and telecomm capabilities over optical fibers strung along the power cables. That replaced a fault-monitoring system which consisted of guys driving around with radios and, literally, dropping quarters into pay phones. Wound up selling that to Westinghouse, and the basic technology is still being used today.

I kicked around the telecomm business for a while, then got into the venture capital business. One of the companies I funded was an operational system layer for fiber optic networks… allowing the optical equipment to negotiate in realtime without human intervention. The idea was that the machines themselves would identify optimum routes as traffic requirements changed as well as routing around failures from cable breaks or other equipment problems. Combination of sensors, telemetry, and some centralized intelligence: that was M2M.

Good idea. We got a beta test with a well-funded startup telecom operator called… Global Crossing. In 2001. Ouch.

So we said no more messing around with these fly-by-night telecom operators. We pulled out all the stops and got a beta test with the second-biggest network in the country. A company named… Worldcom.

Yep, Bernie Ebbers company. We were in their lab when everything fell apart in early 2002. Double ouch.

So we were a bit early with that particular implementation of M2M. Companies like Cisco and Ciena do it today, so the basic idea was a good one, just ahead of its time.

Now, ten years later, I’m running the economic development group at Georgia Tech, and I’m seeing M2M wherever I go. It’s a subset of what Kevin Ashton labelled “The Internet of Things”… what happens when every physical device has sensing capability and telemetry connections to the wider world?

At Georgia Tech, we have an amazing technical depth in sensors of all types. A lot of that started with our work for the military, but a lot of it is now moving into the commercial sector. We have sensors for just about everything. Optical, microwave, acoustical, chemical, mechanical… you name it, if you can detect it or measure it, Georgia Tech probably has worked a sensor for it.

One of the most practical sounds silly, but it’s important. We have a startup company that’s putting ammonia sensors in big industrial chicken coops to control their ventilation fans. It turns out that ammonia buildup is a huge problem, and they currently solve it by having guys drive around in pickup trucks and sniff the air. If they smell ammonia, they flip on a fan for a while. Some sensor work done out of GTRI will let chicken producers do that from a central location.

I’m detecting an echo here.. here I am, putting middle-aged guys out of work again…

Then we have our work with energy harvesting. If you start planning on scattering wireless sensors hither and yon, you quickly run into the problem of powering them.

Batteries are cheap, but changing batteries isn’t.

So we have G.K. Chang working on using flexible nanomaterials to create a tiny amount of electric current, just from flexing. Which means they could be powered by wind, or HVAC airflow, or even blood circulation. That means you could instrument an entire building for temperature, or an entire oil refinery for pressure, without miles of wiring or thousands of batteries.

And I mentioned blood circulation… It turns out that putting sensors inside the human body is a huge opportunity. One of our startup companies is named CardioMEMS. You might have heard of them; they did a deal with St. Judes that values the company at about $450 million. It’s an interesting story.

Mark Allen, a professor in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, was funded by the Air Force to invent pressure sensors that could work inside a jet engine. That turns out to be a really hard problem, since you can’t exactly run wires to them, since the wires would melt. So Mark got that working… but, at the same time, a physician at the Cleveland Clinic was looking for ways to measure blood pressure inside the heart and the major cardiac arteries.

There are a whole class of situations where arteries can rupture and cause immense damage. For patients at risk, it’d be great to have constant monitoring of their pressure and detect trouble before it starts. You can’t expect them to trot into the clinic for a CT scan every day. And if you implant a traditional sensor, you’d have the problem of changing batteries. Do you know anyone with a pacemaker? Changing that battery costs $10,000.

But Jay and Mark together were able to invent a sensor that can be remotely powered by low levels of microwave energy, so you can fit the whole thing into a little chip that gets implanted through a cardiac catheter, without surgery. So you have an outpatient procedure, then you can go home, measure your pressure daily when you brush your teeth, then have it sent over phone lines to your doctor’s office. It turns out to reduce emergency hospitalizations by 38% per year.

That’s a big deal. And that’s M2M.

At the other extreme, I met with a company last week that’s automating those huge sprinkler pivot systems you see in South Georgia. Each one of them put out about a million gallons of water per day. If you’ve been following the news in Georgia, we’ve had recent years of drought conditions, and we’re in the midst of a water war with a couple of neighboring states, because we’ve grown so fast and don’t have enough reservoir capacity.

It turns out that 80% of the water consumed in Georgia goes to agriculture, and about half of that is wasted. By building a network of moisture sensors and targeting which spots need moisture versus which ones don’t, you can greatly reduce the amount of water you need for irrigation. And one of their examples is a farmer who is farming 20,000 acres across six counties. He’ll be able to manage all those irrigation systems from one computer. That’s M2M.

One more example: vehicle-to-vehicle communication. This is something we’re working with in the Georgia Tech Research Institute, again as a spin-out of military technologies. Civilian applications mean that your car will talk to every other car on the road. If there’s a slowdown up ahead, your car will adjust your speed by applying the brakes just a bit in advance. So you’re saving gas, reducing the chance of accidents, and smoothing out the flow of traffic, all at the same time. And if you’ve ever encountered Atlanta traffic, every bit of smoothing can help.

Take it a little further, and every car on the road will start negotiating with every other, so your GPS will start giving you alternate routes based on realtime events and traffic situations. And, eventually, the cars will just drive themselves, so you can read the paper or catch up on email during your commute. That sounds pretty good to me. And that’s M2M.

So… healthcare, water usage, and traffic. That’s three of the biggest challenges facing Georgia. And M2M is going to play a key role in solving all of them. Like I said, at Georgia Tech, we’re seeing M2M technology wherever we turn. It’s a great time for the industry, and I hope you’ve had a productive day talking about it.

With that… thanks very much for having me here tonight, and back to dinner!

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Once again, I’m honored to have been asked to speak in the Space and Science tracks at Dragon*Con.

Dragon takes over downtown Atlanta during Labor Day weekend. It’s enormous. All the public reports of attendance are wrong… they admit to “40,000+” but that’s low-balled to avoid fire code problems.

But for those of you who don’t know, there is a wing of the Hilton reserved for the few hundred attendees who are too geeky for DragonCon… and that’s where the Space and Science tracks are. (Plus a couple of others, like Skeptics, EFF, and Podcasting.) Yes, when most normal humans would be going in search of Princess Leia bikini models, we’re learning about astrophysics and nuclear power plants…

Anyhow, I’m on three times this year:

What’s in the Labs at Georgia Tech?
Friday, 2:30 pm, Science track

Enter the Commercial Space Age
Sunday, 7:00 pm, Space track
with Michael Mealling

NASA Goes Commercial
Monday, 11:30 am, Space track
with Michael Mealling, John Bradford, A.C. Charania

I hope those of you attending can drag yourself away from the (admittedly incredible) entertainment programming and cross the pedestrian bridge from the Marriott to join us in the Hilton. My sessions are during family-friendly hours (i.e., not Saturday night), so bring your kids. Have a great con!

PS, for those who asked: My incredibly popular and thought-provoking talk on alternative energy (“Hydrogen Cars, Ethanol, Wind Farms, and other Silly Ideas“) was apparently vetoed by Science track management this year as being insufficiently respectful to prevailing opinions, even though I filled the room last year, and there are empty slots on the schedule. C’est la guerre.

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(This is Gov. Perdue of North Carolina speaking at the Southern Growth Policy Board; confusing, because we had our own Gov. Perdue in Georgia until six months ago!)
 

Standard iPhone 4 photo

With PhotoJojo lens installed
 

See the full gallery on Posterous

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Arthur C. Clarke predicted this (can’t find it with a quick Google search, but it’s probably in one of my copies of When All the World Was One). He was thinking of war correspondents behind enemy lines, uploading footage directly to comsats. That happened in 1991 during the first Gulf War.  But now it’s available to basically anyone.

Like these soldiers returning from Afghanistan: http://bit.ly/kg9beD

I tweeted about it last night, read a bunch of comments, and finally registered on Delta’s blog to state my disapproval more fully this morning.  Turns out that my comment didn’t pass muster with Delta’s moderation police. In the unlikely event that anyone cares, I’m capturing a screenshot of it here for posterity, typo and all:

Here’s the 2008 policy I referred to: http://bit.ly/k6lbZ2

And, yes, after a day of public outcry, Delta publicly reversed themselves. http://bit.ly/lp9DVz. But the reversal should never have been necessary, since the front-line employee should have been empowered to interject some common sense and say “You know, policy is you only get three bags, but I’m going to waive that in your case. Thank you, and welcome home.”

Yes, there could be some abuse. As I shared with Monday morning breakfast companion Joe Landon,

@joe_landon The cost of checking a 4th bag for every soldier, forever, doesn’t approach PR cost of this screwup. THAT’S “running a business”

And my last tweet on the topic was:

@joe_landon Bingo. Empower your employees. If you don’t trust them, hire better employees.

More companies will find themselves vulnerable to the instant-firestorm that Delta just experienced. If you create the right corporate culture, you have nothing to fear.

Update

“It’s not the crime, it’s the coverup.”

Wondering about the broken link at http://bit.ly/k6lbZ2 ? Since I posted that an hour ago, Delta has removed from their website a 15 August 2008 release waiving all baggage fees for returning military personnel. Scrambling for damage control?

Luckily, a contemporaneous WSJ story still exists: http://on.wsj.com/lO9ILi

And I was able to snag a screenshot from the Google cache:

(Click the image to embiggen.)

Because I want the text to be Google-searchable, I’m reproducing the first two paragraphs here:

Aug 15, 2008

ATLANTA, Aug. 15, 2008 — Delta Air Lines (NYSE: DAL) today announced that effective immediately it will waive all excess baggage fees for active military personnel travelling on orders. The fee waivers apply to baggage quantity, weight and size, allowing active servicemen and women to travel with optimum flexibility.

“Delta has a long tradition of supporting our troops and it is important that they find travel with us welcoming and flexible,” said Steve Gormen, Delta’s executive vice president – Operations. “We respect the courage our military men and women display every day and the people Delta find it an honor to serve them.”

Except for a little bafflegab around “optimal flexibility,” this is a straight, admirable, and to-the-point policy. What changed at Delta between summer 2008 and spring 2011?

And who removed this press release from their website today, and on whose authority?

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“The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

– William Gibson, science fiction writer

Those of us who grew up on The Jetsons may feel cheated. It’s the 21st century, and we don’t have flying cars, or Moon vacations, or Rosie the Robot cooking our meals. But we have some pretty amazing technology, and sometimes it’s easy to take it for granted. Especially when you work for Georgia Tech, and hang out with some of the sharpest and most forward-thinking technologists in the world.

Most people don’t.

On a global basis, I was particularly reminded of Gibson’s famous quote over the last two months during my trips to China and Brazil. There are a lot of people on the planet for whom electric lights arrived within the last few decades, and their new automobile is the first one ever owned by their family. There are many more who still don’t have electricity, or cars, and are looking forward to acquiring both. And those technologies — basic for us in the USA — will have more of an impact on their lives than Rosie the Robot would on ours.

But, even close to home, the future is unevenly distributed. I’ve been reminded of this in a couple of areas lately…

I have a cable modem at my house that routinely delivers 10 megabits/second of voice, data, and video. I complain that it costs me fifty dollars per month. But that level of service is completely unattainable in many rural counties in Georgia. Outside the major metro areas, many residents are still on dial-up modems at tens of kilobits/second… and many more still haven’t figured out what the Internet is good for, and haven’t connected yet. Even business users are limited to “fractional T1? lines, which deliver hundreds of kilobits — not megabits! — per second, but at a cost far higher than I pay for my home service.

That’s about to change. The Federal government has awarded more than $70 million in grants to Georgia companies to build out our rural broadband infrastructure. Dozens of companies are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in optical fiber, Internet routers, switches, and the operations support necessary to bring broadband connectivity to almost every residence and office in Georgia.

For these Georgians, it will be like pressing a fast-forward button into the future. Most of that bandwidth, of course, will be wasted on YouTube videos of skateboarding dogs and similar fluff. Some of it will connect families and friends through cheap or free videoconferencing. But some of it will be used to reinvent businesses. Business-quality videoconferencing. Electronic sharing of X-rays and other medical data. Collaborative workspaces. An employee in Blue Ridge or Bainbridge will have the same access to network connectivity as one in Buckhead. The “future,” at least in Georgia, will be distributed a little more evenly. And this will all happen in the next few years.

But some of my recent encounters with the medical profession reminded me of Gibson’s quote again… only in reverse. Consider your medical diagnostics and treatments. Right now, if you have good medical insurance, you’ll find yourself surrounded by advanced technology for a routine checkup. If your primary physician recommends a specialist, you’ll encounter even more. But, for most Americans, the results of those scans and imagings and lab tests create islands of information that aren’t connected. Many doctors — even at the ultra-sophisticated Emory Eye Clinic — remain dependent on clipboards, printouts, fax machines, and manila file folders.

Other countries have taken different paths. In Hong Kong, all 40 hospitals and 120 clinics can share records and radiology images for the region’s seven million residents. Approximately 30,000 clinical staff use the network every day. In Brazil, millions of patients have electronic medical records that they, their physicians, and their laboratories can all access over the Internet. They’ll never hear “Oh, we don’t have access to that X-ray, so we’ll just take another one here.” How many of you have heard something like that from an American doctor or hospital? I certainly have.

So, the future is distributed a little unevenly, but this time, the USA is behind. Paperless doctor’s offices have been promised for years — much of the technology used in Hong Kong and Brazil was invented in the United States! — but legal, political, and economic barriers have prevented widespread deployment. That’s about to change. The Federal government is investing more than $19 billion to accelerate the conversion to networked electronic medical records — and will start withholding a percentage of Medicare reimbursements for those providers who are not demonstrating “meaningful use” by 2014.

Implementing health interchange networks will be a huge change for more than 400,000 health care workers in Georgia alone. And, again, this will all happen in the next few years.

Times of great change bring great opportunity. And these changes mean great opportunity for Georgia Tech.

We’re in a unique position. We are one of the greatest technological research universities in the world, but we’re in a state with some of the most rural counties in the United States. We have the ability to help these counties “fast forward” by implementing existing technologies in ways that simply haven’t been available to them before. Redistributing the future to rural Georgia doesn’t require any scientific breakthroughs, but good solid engineering and public policy work. That’s the sort of work that Georgia Tech has always been good at, and I think we’re going to be able to make a real difference in Georgia over the next few years.

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While searching for something else in my boxes of decaying paper files recently, I ran across a couple of articles I wrote for publication in 1987/88. Neither one was published; one was submitted to Reason, and they gently declined it as “not of general interest.” The other one was written on a handshake with a telecom trade journal editor, but he lost his job between that handshake and the time I got the article written.

I think they’ve held up reasonably well. Obviously, I got some things spectacularly wrong. (In particular, if you had told me that I’d be living within a mile of BellSouth (now AT&T) headquarters in the year 2010 and still couldn’t get fiber to my home, I’d have thought you were crazy. On the other hand, I consistently get 10 Mb/s on my Comcast cable modem, so I’m pretty happy with that.) And I thought CD-ROMs were going to be important.

On the other hand, I think I got a few things spectacularly right. I not only think I predicted the World Wide Web, but I predicted the “Net Neutrality” scuffle, too! I obviously haven’t edited these at all; I ran them through OCR and added HTML tags. So… into the Wayback Machine, and enjoy!

(The other blast from the past is here.)

Towards a Hypertext Ecology

Part I: HyperCard versus Hypertext

By now, you have probably encountered a wealth of information about Apple’s HyperCard. It is an incredibly impressive piece of programming that Apple is labelling as a “personal toolkit for information.” But, as the name gives away, HyperCard is being widely touted as the vanguard of a new breed of “hypertext.”

Hypertext is a child of the computer age; it defines linked information, with links being defined by the author (and others), not just by the mechanics of placing words and pictures on the printed page. The concept, initially planned for mainframes, has been around for many years, with implementations appearing in the last few years on various microcomputers. HyperCard, by virtue of being free to all new Macintosh users, appears to legitimatize hypertext as the information interface of the future.

This is all well and good, and many of the dazzling initial applications of HyperCard can indeed change the way people use their computers. Even today, HyperCard stacks can display simple black-and-white animation and play back digitized sound recordings. In the future, it can and certainly will be used to access color animation and video as a front end to CD-ROM and other new data storage formats. However, it lacks the capacity to handle today’s most common reference tasks: retrieving large quantities of text with occasional illustrations.

Without such capabilities, stand-alone HyperCard applications may be limited to a flood of address books and Finder replacements. You may have obtained a copy, poked around in some of the demonstration “stacks” — and, perhaps, wondered what all the furor is about. By itself, it may not seem worth the hardware investment in extra memory and larger monitors required to use it to its full potential. (After all, why should I keep my address list in HyperCard under MultiFinder when Acta does it so well on my existing system?)

But this is not being fair to HyperCard or to Bill Atkinson. The existing release of HyperCard is not claimed to be a final product, and Atkinson plans to continue refining it for years to come. But a vision of the future of hypertext could not be complete without considering the technological environment of that future — an environment where information availability threatens to overwhelm any user, and where paths to that information are at least as important as the information itself.

Sticky buttons

First, let us consider some of the failings of HyperCard as it exists today. The first, and most critical, is the lack of “sticky buttons.” This allows an information link to be attached to a concept rather than to a particular position on a page. For example, if I referred to Alexander Hamilton in an article, pressing the mouse on the words “Alexander Hamilton” should display some information about that man. But in HyperCard, buttons are defined by screen position. If I edited my article to put in some information about Aaron Burr, moving the Alexander Hamilton reference further down the screen, the button would no longer be with its intended reference. Reformatting the article (for a different font size or column width) would have the same effect. With sticky buttons, however, the on-screen “hot spot” would move with the reformatted text to remain over the words “Alexander Hamilton.”

Without sticky buttons, the existing implementation of HyperCard is much more “hypergraphics” than it is “hypertext.” Screen-oriented design limits HyperCard to linking information in screen-sized chunks that are not likely to change. (Indeed, although text fields may be scrolled, the window may not even be resized from the “classic” Mac size of 512 by 342 pixels.) This makes it useful for on-line help and CD-ROM interfaces, but not for a true hypertext environment where information is published, linked, and edited on-line by many users simultaneously.

Other programs, other problems

Other Macintosh applications handle this task better. Guide, the original Macintosh hypertext program, is much more text oriented than HyperCard. It includes sticky buttons, although it does not have the extensive graphics capabilities and control over screen layout provided by HyperCard. Even with some irritating choices for user interface (italics meaning one thing, underlining another, etc.), Guide had the potential to grow into an impressive hypertext system. However, it is difficult for a commercial program to compete with free system software (as HyperCard is classified), so the future of Guide seems bleak.

More, from Living Videotext, is not normally considered a hypertext program. Even so, it handles some hypertext functions better than either HyperCard or Guide. Links are easy to follow (either hierarchical or through cloning) and multiple-window management is superb. Documents can grow to very large sizes gracefully, while editing or reformatting the text does not alter information links. Graphics and text can be mixed reasonably well, and the interface is intuitive to anyone who has ever learned outlining in sixth grade. However, More was designed to create and manage outlines, and this makes it too hierarchical to be an implementation of hypertext.

Workstations for hypertext

Considering the limitations of each of these programs, what would be the optimum user interface for a future hypertext program? One parameter is clear: the release and market acceptance of the Macintosh II has forever changed the base of future Macintosh applications. Within a few years, most new applications will be written assuming 68020 or better processing power, hard disks, several megabytes of memory, and large screens in infinite variety. (Those of us clinging to our Mac Pluses will be forced to limp along with Excel. Cricket Draw, and — someday — FullWrite Professional… still powerful tools, but tools that will appear shabby compared to those available to better-heeled comrades.)

Computer monitors are by definition bulky items, since the display must be large enough for a human to read comfortably. The standard Macintosh II displays 640×480 pixels of information, and larger screens are available. This size makes them partially immune to the dramatic cost reductions seen in microchips, hard disks, and other computer technologies, but economies of scale are sure to drive the cost of large high-resolution monitors ever downward. It seems not unreasonable to assume that a hypertext workstation could easily command a screen of 1200×800 pixels at 72 dpi with 256 gray shades available. Higher resolution, larger screens, or color would be available to those who needed it. But even with this minimum, the user interface for a hypertext application (or any Macintosh application) could change significantly.

On-screen display of buttons

First, sticky buttons could be indicated by a light gray shading underneath the affected text. This could be disabled by user preference (for a rapid browser not wishing to link to any other information), but, when enabled, would provide an unobtrusive indication of what items have been linked for further study. (Compare to the rather clunky indications used by Guide due to the on-off nature of the pixels on the original Macintosh: italics, asterisks, and so forth.)

However, a more visually appealing way of indicating buttons is not sufficient. One failing of HyperCard, Guide, and other existing hypertext programs is that an item is linked to one-and-only-one destination: that intended by the author. This is clearly inadequate for browsing through large information spaces; multiple links must be available. One way of indicating this consistent with the Macintosh interface is for a button to have an associated “pop-up” menu giving a range of options for connecting information. In an example given by Eric Drexler, “Links in a description of a coral reef will lead to both texts on reef ecology and tales of hungry sharks.”

[Hypercomment: Drexler's book, Engines of Creation, is one of the most mind- opening books I have ever read. Both the specific technology (that of molecular machinery) and the discussion of cultural impact (generic to all technologies) are clearly reasoned and well presented. Chapter 14 is devoted to hypertext, and I strongly recommend it to all those interested in the topic]

Customizable link display

To prevent information overload, these links should be customizable by the user. Optimally, an artificially intelligent “genie” would display references only to material that would interest its “master.” Failing this, a system of customizable options should be relatively easy to set up.

For example, many Macintosh users are interested in electronic music. I am not. On CompuServe’s MAUG, I have set my “user options” to skip over all messages labelled as pertaining to electronic music. If for some reason I wish to change this preference (such as doing research for a friend without access to CompuServe), I can do so at any time. Normally, however, I proceed onward unaware of controversies raging over MIDI links and opcodes and so forth. A similar system, vastly extended, should be feasible for hypertext. (I will return to this topic a little later.)

Two-way links

Another important extension to HyperCard’s implementation of buttons would be two-way links. This would allow the user to press a button to find out “What points here?” as well as “What does this point to?” This would provide the perfect way to track down references, popular topics, and half-remembered quotes from a forgotten magazine article.

[This type of capability will probably by used by some as an argument in favor of a multi-button mouse, especially in an authoring environment: one button for editing, one for following a link, one for tracing a reference backwards, and so forth. However, this would deny Apple's vision in implementing one-button mice ever since the Lisa. Proper software design and screen interfaces can always make a one-button mouse sufficient. As early as MacPaint, this was handled by choosing a tool from a palette and then performing an operation. Extensions of this, plus keyboard shortcuts for the expert user, can always maintain the intuitive friendliness of a one-button mouse.]

Window replacement

Another problem with HyperCard (as well as other hypertext programs such as Guide) is their reaction to pressing a button. The program instantaneously takes you to wherever that button is linked, just as if that is where you had always intended to go. Sometimes, this is true. But consider a student reading a hypertext article on the Punic Wars. When reading about Hannibal crossing the Alps, he or she could, with the click of a button, be in the midst of a treatise on European geography. Even in the simple HyperCard stacks available today, this can be confusing and disorienting for the unsuspecting user.

HyperCard has excellent methods of backtracking, of course, but this shouldn’t be necessary. A linked window should not replace the existing window, but should simply open a new window in front of the old. These new windows could then be rearranged, stacked, used for cut-and-paste, or closed like any other Macintosh window. The original article would always remain on screen, a mouse click or a menu selection away.

Browser’s tools

The complexities of managing information in multiple displays with such a wealth of choices would send many users scurrying for pencil and paper: “Now, I need to remember to look down that path once I’m finished with this one.” This should not be necessary. An automated “note pad” function should keep track of paths taken and not taken, with allowance for user comments about how and why. A graphical display of links should be summonable, highlighting areas the user tracked down and areas missed. Most importantly, programmable user options would allow the user to specify what level of detail he or she is interested in. This would prevent an overwhelming number of choices for the casual user, but allow the full complexity of the system to be available to the more experienced student.

Implementation of large databases

Once sticky buttons and a friendly user interface are developed, the task of the information providers becomes that of implementing these features for very large databases. The sheer volume of information can be a serious hurdle, since a truly useful hypertext system would allow the user to access all the information contained in a good-sized library. Optical scanners with rudimentary AI programs will be required to scan millions of pages and convert them into machine-usable format. More difficult than entering all the information, however, will be defining the buttons and their links.

Like the neurons in a human brain, the intelligence in a large network of this type does not consist of the individual items, but in the linkages between them. As Jerry Pournelle has foreseen, by the end of this century, any computer-literate citizen will be able to obtain the answer to any question for which an answer has been discovered. Intelligence will not be defined as having information, but in knowing how to ask the right questions to find it. The proper use of hypertext can make these questions intuitive; indeed, it should make the questioning process transparent. A user will simply follow links in a natural progression, finding one of many possible paths to the object of his or her search.

User-controllable linking

Each user will have idiosyncratic search methods and individual types of useful information. Therefore, accessible links and categories of links should be user controllable. A particular user would “teach” the hypertext system about his or her background: education, interests, job requirements, and so forth. This information could be used to filter the buttons displayed and linkages offered to that user. A user would only see those links which match his or her criteria, unless intentionally overridden.

This not only would help prevent information overload, but would save the user money as well. Under the proposal for Ted Nelson’s Project XANADU (the ancestor of all hypertext proposals, and one still being created), authors would be paid royalties based on the number of users accessing their material. With controllable links, users would not waste money accessing information outside their area of expertise or interest. Indeed, if the defaults are overridden, the system could take notice of that fact. Say, for example, I was reading a biography of physicist Richard Feynman. If a certain paper sounded interesting, I might try linking to a copy, whether it matched my personal linkage criteria or not. Before displaying the text, the hypertext system should display a dialog box something like: “Note: This reference assumes detailed knowledge of quantum chromodynamics. Access will cost $0.35. Do you want to access it?” At this point, I would click the Cancel button, leaving Dr. Feynman 35 cents poorer and myself considerably chastened.

Assignment of linkages

Although it is tempting to delegate the tedious task of assigning links to the same computer program responsible for scanning in books and magazines, this would probably not be feasible in the near future. This task requires a great deal of judgement and correlation of wide-ranging knowledge with the context in question. For example, consider a reference to someone being “like Caesar’s wife, above reproach.” This could logically be linked to articles on famous quotations, on the importance of reputation for public officials, or on Gary Hart’s 1987 campaign for the Presidency. However, it should not be linked to a biography of Calpurnia, wife of Julius Cœsar — which is surely what any self-respecting computer program would try to do.

Delivering the information

Much work on wide-ranging, densely-interconnected databases is hampered by the limitations of today’s technology. Databases are currently limited in size (such as a typical 20 MB hard disk) and/or in access speed (such as a typical on-line service at 1200 baud). However, developing a true hypertext system will take years. We should consider its development based not on today’s technology, but on technology that is reasonably sure to be in the marketplace in the next five to ten years. As we will see, this can mean a quantum leap in the amount of information that can be efficiently accessed by a hypertext workstation. This problem of information delivery will be discussed in the second part of this article.

Part II: Hypertext in an Age of Infinite Bandwidth

[In the first half of this article, we examined some of the current shortcomings of HyperCard and listed some of the features desirable for a future implementation of true hypertext. Most of these features depended on technology that is currently available, but prohibitively expensive — in particular, access to large chunks of information such as photographs, video, and lengthy text articles. This half examines upcoming technologies that will make such access feasible for the average consumer — essentially, ushering in an age of infinite bandwidth.]

CD-ROM

Among the technologies soon to be used in delivering hypertext information, nearest to term are CD-ROM (compact disk – read only memory) devices, very similar to CD music players. These disks are small and inexpensive, but can store many gigabytes of information. (A gigabyte is equal to one billion bytes, or one thousand megabytes. This would be roughly equal to twice the amount of text in the Encyclopedia Brittanica.) CD-ROM disks can mix text, graphics, digitized sounds, and video in a single reference.

Some CD-ROM devices are already on the market, and availability of software (databases) for them is expected to begin strong growth in 1988. Since CD-ROM is “read- only” (cannot be altered by the user), disks will be treated somewhat as almanacs or encyclopedias — a great deal of information, current when published, but requiring new versions annually (or at some convenient interval).

Optical fibers

Slightly further out for most consumers, but firmly in the mainstream of telecommunications, are optical fiber links. These communication “pipes” can carry stunning amounts of information error-free over great distances. Since the early 1980% they have reshaped the telecommunications industry and led to the installation of billions of dollars of state-of-the-art cable and equipment.

To date, the most noticeable purchasers of fiber optic cable and electronics have been the members of the telephony industry: local exchange carriers, who serve as your local phone company, and inter-exchange carriers, such as AT&T, MCI, and US Sprint. Fiber systems have allowed these users to vastly increase the capacity and flexibility of their networks. As prices continue to fall, however, optical fibers will provide end users with real-time access to vast amounts of information.

Optical fiber communications is based on transmitting brief light pulses over hair-thin strands of glass. This technology was first proposed in the mid-1960′s; after 15 years of laboratory experimentation, the first commercially successful systems began service in the late 1970′s. Newer systems were introduced at a rapid clip, offering telephone companies and long-distance carriers ever-increasing bandwidth and reach. (Bandwidth refers to the amount of information that can be carried by a particular system; reach refers to the distance a signal may be transmitted before requiring costly electronic regeneration.)

Many technologies have converged to make high-bandwidth fiber optic systems economical. The advent of VLSI (very-large-scale integrated) circuits allows single chips to perform functions that used to require entire shelves of equipment. New software tools allow companies to develop complex control systems to automatically monitor and maintain optical systems. And rapid advances in semiconductor lasers have led to incredible price drops for these solid-state devices that form the heart of any optical transmission system: a tiny laser, no larger than a grain of rice, that would have cost tens of thousands of dollars in the mid-1970′s can now be purchased for less than $10 for use in compact-disc players.

From the early days of optical fiber systems at the beginning of this decade, transmission speeds were at least an order of magnitude greater than those of copper-wire-based telephony systems. Early systems operated at 45 Mb/s (megabits per second, where a megabit is one million bits), while systems operating at 565 Mb/s and higher have been in daily use for nearly two years. By the early 1990′s, systems operating at 2.4 Gb/s (gigabits per second, where a gigabit is one billion bits) should be readily available to meet the skyrocketing communications needs in the public communications network. This stunning information capacity leads to a shift in the type of information that may be provided to an end user — not just a difference in amount, but a difference in kind.

Narrowband and wideband services

First, a few definitions are in order. All services available to the casual user today are categorized as narrowband: voice, data over modems, even the digital ISDN links expected to be deployed within a few years. Narrowband services can be classed as those requiring up to 64 kb/s (64,000 bits per second) of information. This is adequate for good voice reproduction, as on a telephone, and more than adequate for most computer links (often 1200 bits per second, occasionally up to 9600 bps). (Note that telephony, unlike the computer industry, measures digital data in terms of bits, not bytes. Also, a thousand is a thousand, unlike a “K” which is 1024. This means that a 10 megabit/second communications link could transmit about 1.2 megabytes per second. This is taken into account in the arithmetic that follows.)

Some services today are being labelled as wideband. These services require a significantly higher bit rate than narrowband services — up to several megabits per second. Wideband links can be used for high-speed data transmission between sites, or may be used to carry a number of individual voice channels multiplexed onto a single carrier. A standard industry speed known as a Tl link is 1.544 Mb/s; this is frequently used by large companies who lease Tl facilities from telephony carriers and purchase Tl multiplexers to interface these links to their voice and data networks.

Broadband services

Above the wideband rate, very-high-bandwidth services are usually classified as broadband. (The dividing line is not very sharp: Tl links, at 1.5 Mb/s, are normally not termed broadband; Ethernets, at 10 Mb/s, normally are.) These are still undergoing definition, since current networks are unable to deliver broadband links to end users except in very special (and expensive) circumstances. However, the falling prices of optical fiber systems (cable and electronics) and the rising demand for higher and higher bit rates will inevitably lead to commercially-available broadband links. Initially, these links will probably be around 150 Mb/s; eventually, they will be limited only by customer demand and willingness to pay.

The transmission medium for broadband services will be, of course, optical fiber. “Fiber to the home” has been a rallying cry for many of the telephone operating companies throughout the 1980′s. Various trials have proven that residential fiber connections are technically feasible. Although still more expensive than standard copper pairs, fiber costs are dropping to the point where, by the mid-1990′s, fiber to the home will be economically feasible as well.

As we will see, broadband services delivered to the office workstation or the home terminal will open up a huge range of possibilities to the end user. Nowhere is this more exciting than in the implications for hypertext.

Transmission speeds

The telephone service that you have in your home today is transmitted over analog circuits. This technology is essentially unchanged from the methods invented by Alexander Graham Bell (although, naturally, vast technical improvements have been made). However, your home is quite possibly served by a digital central office switch.

(The chances of this are highest if you live in a fast-growing suburb of a large city; lowest if you live in a distant rural area.) If so, your voice is digitized and transmitted between offices at the rate of 64 kb/s, an international standard for voice-grade communication.

ISDN service (Integrated Services Digital Network) will extend this digital link to your doorstep. This would allow you to have a direct link into your Macintosh or other device at 64,000 bits per second — clearly, a great improvement over the 1200 baud modems common today. This link would certainly be wonderful for existing services such as CompuServe and various BBS systems, but it is still insufficient for other services, such as entertainment audio and video. Consumer pressure for enhanced-quality video and programming on demand will lead to the development of broadband fiber links to home and office beginning in the mid-1990′s. Once these links are in place for entertainment systems, computer-based applications are sure to follow in short order. Let us examine some possible “chunks” of data, transmission times required over various communication links, and their relationship to an evolved hypertext system.

The samples I have chosen for Table 1 are as follows: a “classic” 9-inch Macintosh screen, a Macintosh II screen (with 256 shades of gray-scale information), an average 400-page novel, a high-resolution color monitor (1200×800 pixels with 24-bit color), a 20 megabyte hard disk, the World Almanac, 30 minutes of CD-quality music, the Encyclopedia Brittanica (with and without pictures), and 10 minutes of broadcast-quality color video. Each of these represent items that might logically be transmitted over a multimedia information-retrieval system such as hypertext.

I have made rough estimates of the number of bytes required to transmit each of these chunks of data, without allowing for compression. (Modern compression techniques could reduce the bit rate required for any of these transmissions by a factor of two or more.) Also, note that these numbers relate to transmission times only: the figure for transmitting a full-screen color image is exactly that, and does not take into account processing time or screen refresh rates. It would be foolish to try and estimate processing power a decade in the future — however, a brief check of past trends and an appreciation of high-temperature superconductors would indicate that rapid improvements in processing speed are not likely to slow down for many years to come.

I show transmission times for these pieces of information at four bit rates: 1200 bits per second (the speed of most modems today), 64 kb/s (the speed of ISDN digital links), 150 Mb/s (the speed of an early broadband services network), and 2.4 Gb/s (the speed of optical communication systems being deployed near the end of this decade). None of the figures should be taken as accurate to the last decimal place; however, some interesting order of magnitude relationships appear.

A variety of observations may be made from this table. First, consider typical files of the size downloadable today — such as a MacPaint screen shot on CompuServe. This takes approximately 3 minutes at 1200 baud, but would take only 3 seconds over an ISDN link. A very large CompuServe file, such as a gray-scale Mac II screen, will be transmitted in less than a minute. Obviously, direct 64 kb/s digital service will greatly speed access to the types of information available today.

More interesting, however, are the last two columns — representative of broadband communication systems known to be feasible with today’s technology. Over a 150 Mb/s link, a user could download the entire contents of a 20 megabyte hard disk in little over a second. With 2.4 Gh/s of bandwidth available, the entire Encyclopaedia Brittanica — with pictures — is available in under 12 seconds! By comparison, this would take nearly a year at 1200 baud. Clearly, broadband services will give the user access to totally different kinds of information than those available today.

From AT&T studies of long-distance telephone dialling, the typical user’s “irritation time” — from entering a command to expecting some sort of response — is about six-tenths of a second. Computer programs that take much longer than this to respond to user commands seem sluggish and awkward. Today, Macintosh applications can use this much time in scrolling between sections of a document. Tomorrow, a workstation will be able to use this time to download the contents of the World Almanac… five times. In a hypertext system, clicking on the title of a Bach sonata could produce a photographic- quality image of Bach and a CD-quality rendition of the sonata… with almost no time lag.

Economics of broadband transmission

Naturally, many barriers must be overcome before such systems are available to the public — but there apparently are no technical reasons why they cannot be built. For example, 565 Mb/s fiber optic systems are in use today in thousands of locations throughout the country. Technically, there is no reason why similar systems, optimized for broadband service instead of telephony requirements, could not be installed in homes today. Today, however, these systems cost tens of thousands of dollars apiece… clearly not feasible for home use.

But consider the history of the semiconductor laser, alluded to above. These devices were invented in the 1960′s. Like all semiconductor devices, they are so small that the cost of materials involved is trivial. However, through the 1970′s, semiconductor lasers sold to researchers cost many thousands of dollars. Why? Because the fabricator of the chip had to recover the one-time cost related to development of the design of the chip and creation of an assembly system. With only a few hundred or thousand units sold, lasers were fabricated by hand or, at most, in semi-automated systems. Naturally, the cost for an individual device was very high.

Enter the compact-disc player. Suddenly, the demand for semiconductor lasers was measured not in the thousands, but in the millions. New factories could be built to mass-produce these devices. The factories were not cheap, but their cost could be spread over vast numbers of lasers. Economies of scale came into play, and the cost of semiconductor lasers dropped within a few years to less than ten dollars. The result? One of the most popular consumer electronic items of the decade, with millions of units sold… each with technical sophistication that would have been nearly inconceivable only a decade ago.

Similar price drops have occurred with custom VLSI devices, with flat-panel display screens, with innumerable items once available only in very limited quantities. As technology improved to make these items mass-produceable, consumer pressures brought about huge price drops. There is every reason to believe that a similar pattern will be seen for high-bandwidth optical communication systems.

Tariff issues

Being able to build inexpensive terminals, however, is not the end of the economic story. Local operating companies are regulated by Federal and state governments in terms of what services they can offer and what prices, or tariffs, they can charge for these services. Many regulatory changes will have to be made before your telephone company could offer you broadband service, and the answers are by no means simple. (For example, if you can obtain enhanced video with picture quality equal to 35mm film from your telephone company, what does this do to your local CATV franchise? Or, if the cable franchise is the first to run an optical fiber to your home, can it offer you telephone service?)

In addition, pricing for these services is a thorny problem. Traditionally, telephone companies have charged users proportionately to the bandwidth they use: one telephone line costs a pre-defined amount of money, two lines costs twice that, and so forth. Broadband services, however, make this concept obsolete. A 150 Mb/s channel could transmit the equivalent of over 2,000 voice circuits. If a single telephone line costs $15/month, this would lead to a broadband channel costing $30,000 per month! Clearly, this would never be a popular service. On the other hand, if a broadband channel is priced at a reasonable consumer target of $60/month, this would mean that a single voice channel should cost only three cents per month! At that rate, your local telephone company would quickly go out of business.

It is not even clear if the traditional flat rate should apply to these circuits. If one resident uses a broadband channel for continuous video viewing, while another downloads databases via hypertext for a few seconds per hour, should they be charged the same rate? A usage-sensitive pricing structure may have to be devised, with complex monitoring and billing taking place at the central office.

These regulatory and pricing issues will not be solved easily or quickly. Like many other technologies, broadband capability for video and hypertext may be available before society’s institutions are equipped to handle it.

The hypertext ecology

These issues, however, are certain to be solved because in the end, the customer will insist on it. Limited-scale trials will convince operating companies that end-users are willing to pay for these services. Competitive pressures between telephone companies and CATV operators will result in a race to bring fiber to the home. CD players, digital audio tape (DAT), enhanced or high-definition TV, and other new technologies will raise consumer expectations for information access ever higher. And — perhaps in the background, perhaps not — future-generation hypertext systems will begin to provide friendly, useful front-ends to vast amounts of information. Once consumers are hooked on being able to access the answer to any question almost instantaneously, there will be no going back. The hypertext revolution will be truly underway.

Barry Commoner, environmentalist and one-time Presidential candidate, once proposed two laws of ecology: (1) Nothing ever goes away, and (2) Everything is connected to everything else. These laws indeed apply to our physical world, but they will apply equally well to a hypertext-based information world. Information, once entered into the nationwide or worldwide network, will never disappear. It will always be retrievable (perhaps with annotations by the author or others directing the reader to changes or new interpretations since the original entry). And all pieces of knowledge will be inextricably connected in an densely woven meshwork, where one item leads to the next leads to the next in a dizzying network of logical links. No two users will follow the same path through the meshwork, since each individual will follow different interests or different lines of reasoning.

As users develop new information or new links between existing pieces of information, these can be added to the meshwork. Elements of the network will evolve, just as in a natural ecology, growing larger or smaller, changing function, or merging with other elements. The rules and relationships will be as complex as those in our natural ecology, and as mutable. And people will be part of this meshwork as well — indeed, the most important part of all. For the hypertext ecology will not exist for its own purposes, but will exist to serve its users — providing easier, faster, and more intuitive access to information for all.

Technologies now on the drawing boards will make this hypertext ecology possible. The challenge for the hypertext application designers, the information providers, and the network operators will be to extend the ease of use of HyperCard to a future hypertext system linking millions of users to quadrillions of bits of information… as easily as clicking a mouse.

Written at the invitation of a telecom trade journal in late 1987 or early 1988, but never published.

Tweet

While searching for something else in my boxes of decaying paper files recently, I ran across a couple of articles I wrote for publication in 1987/88. Neither one was published; one was submitted to Reason, and they gently declined it as “not of general interest.” The other one was written on a handshake with a telecom trade journal editor, but he lost his job between that handshake and the time I got the article written.

I think they’ve held up reasonably well. Obviously, I got some things spectacularly wrong. (In particular, if you had told me that I’d be living within a mile of BellSouth (now AT&T) headquarters in the year 2010 and still couldn’t get fiber to my home, I’d have thought you were crazy. On the other hand, I consistently get 10 Mb/s on my Comcast cable modem, so I’m pretty happy with that.) And I thought CD-ROMs were going to be important.

On the other hand, I think I got a few things spectacularly right. I not only think I predicted the World Wide Web, but I predicted the “Net Neutrality” scuffle, too! I obviously haven’t edited these at all; I ran them through OCR and added HTML tags. So… into the Wayback Machine, and enjoy!

(The other blast from the past is here.)

Liberty in the Information Age

submitted to Reason Magazine, 4 December 1988

Popular books, magazines, and television shows loudly proclaim that the Western world is entering an “Information Age.” Personal computers, advanced telecommunications networks, even photocopiers and fax machines are all used as examples of the unprecedented explosion in information storage, retrieval, and manipulation technologies. This is touted as a new age of access to information that will, in the most optimistic views, ring in an era of peace and prosperity around the world.

But what do the new information technologies mean to free minds and free markets? There are some disturbing conclusions that can be drawn from America’s first brush with the new era. First, however, let us examine the technology that will be used to provide the new services to individual homes and businesses.

The Impact of Fiber Optics

New access to information services will be driven by two basic technologies: microprocessing and fiber optics. Microprocessors have had a head start, and have spawned the personal computer revolution of the past decade. This revolution, and its effects, have been abundantly analyzed elsewhere. Optical fibers, on the other hand, are a fundamentally new communications technology. Instead of sending signals over metallic wires, signals can now be sent as pulses of laser light over hair-thin strands of glass. The technical and economic advantages are many-fold, and optical transmission systems will dominate communications planning for the remainder of the century.

Much of the original work in optical communications was performed by Bell Telephone Laboratories prior to the AT&T divestiture. Throughout the 1980s, optical fiber systems have been put into service in every large local and long-distance telephone company in the United States. Optical systems first were used for “long-haul” communications between cities; more recently, they have been used to connect telephone company offices within urban areas. The next step is to connect fiber optic cables to the home.

In contrast to the copper wires that connect your telephone today, optical fibers have an essentially unlimited information capacity. They can transmit any amount of data — voice, music, video, photographs, or computer files — at breathtaking speeds. For example: to transmit the text of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica over standard phone lines using common 1200 baud modems would take approximately six weeks, operating 24 hours per day. Optical fiber systems currently operating in laboratories will be on the market within a year transmitting the same amount of information in under two seconds. Adding all the color photographs would take only ten seconds longer. Retrieval of smaller amounts of information — say, a novel or an audio compact disc — will occur about as fast as you can request it.

The race is on right now to bring optical fibers into every home and business in the land. Although the effort will not be complete until sometime early in the 21st century, preliminary installations by some of the largest corporations in America are in place today. As fiber optic systems and the associated technologies start to become common in the mid-19903, issues of concern to libertarian thinkers will assume crucial importance.

Why should esoteric communications technology be of such concern? Consider. Computer and communications networks will continue to skyrocket in size and complexity, with many of the functions coalescing into a shared global Worldnet. With fiber optic links into this Worldnet, a new home appliance will be invented combining the functions of television, VCR, telephone, personal computer, and fax machine. By the early 21st century, anyone above the poverty line will have access to such a machine, either in their own home or (on a tax-paid or fee- paid basis) somewhere in their community. He or she will be able to access any information requested, instantly, without requiring any particular programming knowledge — or even knowing where the information is stored. In the other direction, individuals will be able to create information of their own, for free or fee-paid access by others. Careers will be pursued, romances will be kindled, fortunes will be made and lost, and the intellectual battles of the 21st century will be fought — not on paper or on video, but on this electronic, international Worldnet.

Such scenarios would normally be dismissed as science fiction today. The 20th century, however, has shown that science fiction is more often than not conservative in its predictions. All the elements to make such a Worldnet possible are in place today. On-line information services such as The Source and CompuServe are a primitive precursor. The cable television industry is fighting many of the opening skirmishes. The network will happen. The worrisome issue is who will control this technology.

Privacy

The first issue of concern to libertarians is, of course, privacy.

During the confirmation hearings of Robert Bork, a newspaper obtained information from his local video store to find out what movies the jurist took home on weekends. Imagine this carried to its ultimate conclusion on a Worldnet — where all your information transactions take place over electronic and fiber optic links. An unscrupulous operator or skilled hacker could find out what music you listened to, which parts of a movie you paused and replayed, and which articles in the local electronic newspaper you skimmed or read in detail. Your mail, incoming and outgoing, could be read or modified without detection, as could the value of any financial transactions not conducted in cold cash. The targeted junk-mail possibilities alone are disturbing. The potential power for a anti-liberty organization (or government) are terrifying.

This is somewhat of a paranoid’s view of information technology, and many professionals in the field are quick to point to layers and layers of security meant to forestall just such instances. Others, however, point to well-publicized electronic break-ins or “virus” infections of some of the most secure computer networks in the nation: the NSA, the CIA, and the Department of Defense. No matter how sophisticated the security technology, the realities of human error, corruptibility, or misjudgment will always allow lapses, whether minor or major. Even for individuals with nothing to hide, the potential threat to privacy posed by tomorrow’s information technology is of concern to libertarians everywhere.

Storage

On a more subtle level, a careless or misinformed government could pervert a national or international network with the best of intentions. First, of course, is the issue of what information is accessible on the Worldnet. Who is to determine which novels are posted? Does Tam Janowitz get priority over Ayn Rand or vice versa? Are Fellini films made available to all users? What about X-rated pornography? Electronic editions of Penthouse magazine? If “special permission” is required — who is in charge of granting that permission? What if a minor steals his parents’ access code? Isn’t it easier to allow only bland, non-controversial works to be made available on the Worldnet?

It is certainly easier. It is also censorship, no matter how well intentioned. This same attitude on the part of the government led to the days of three near-identical television networks serving indistinguishable mental pablum, with public television interspersing the occasional wildlife special or British drama. Only the twin technological revolutions of cable TV and VCRs led to a relaxation of the enforced mediocrity and a new set of choices for the American viewer. Although the new broadcast/cable/cassette video marketplace of the 1980s is still over-regulated and far from perfect, it is immeasurably superior to the lowest-comon-denominator inoffensive television of a decade ago. The lessening of censorship, by whatever name! has increased the choices and freedoms available to us all .

The advent of an strategically and economically critical Worldnet will tempt paternalistic regulators to return to censorship. But no matter how virtuously the custodians of the Worldnet are chosen, who will watch the custodians? The only correct answer to “what information is stored on the Worldnet?” is all information, first-come, first-serve. The cruel but certain hand of market reality will serve to sort things out.

Access

Equally vexing is the issue of indexing the information that is stored. Most information transactions on the Worldnet will not take the rigid form of database queries that are the norm today. Instead, users will browse among works of interest to themI following links as they see fit. These links are termed “hypermedia,” a technology in its infancy today. When reading an article about Mozart, a click of a mouse or other action could bring up a picture of the composer while playing a selection of his work in CD-quality sound. These links will be critical to a user interesting in expanding his overall knowledge of a topic rather than retrieving one particular datum.

Although it is tempting to delegate the tedious task of assigning links to a computer, this will probably not be feasible in the near future. This task requires a great deal of judgement and correlation of wide-ranging knowledge with the context in question. For example, consider a reference to someone being “like Caesar’s wife, above reproach.” This could logically be linked to articles on famous quotations, on the importance of reputation for public officials, or on Gary Hart’s 1987 campaign for the Presidency. However, it should not be linked to a biography of Calpurnia, wife of Julius Caesar — which is surely what any self-respecting computer program would try to do.

These links will have to be established by human librarians, which is where the weakness lies. Take, for example, a librarian setting up a database on economics. Assuming an uncensored storage system, the works of Milton Friedman would be included and would be accessible to anyone making a direct request. If, however, the librarian systematically refrained from adding links to Milton Friedman from other works — due to conscious malice or subconscious bias — the casual browser would have no reason to suspect that Milton Friedman even existed. This is a subtle and almost unprovable form of censorship that could be used to de-emphasize points of view that are unfavorable to the power structure.

Again, low-tech precursors of this can be seen in today’s world. Scan the newspaper articles of last November dealing with election results. You will look in vain for references to votes received by third-party candidates such as Ron Paul and Gloria Fulani. The information is accessible to one who knows to look… but the majority of readers would have no reason to suspect that third parties challenged the status quo represented by Bush and Dukakis. Malice on the part of newspaper publishers? Probably not. Subconscious bias? Possibly. Honest oversight? Probably. A disturbing indication of things to come on a Worldnet? Most definitely.

Electronic Samizdat

Finally, the topic of freedom to publish is of interest to anyone aware of the samizdat phenomenon in the Soviet bloc. “The power of the press belongs to whoever owns one.” In the Worldnet a decade hence, the power of the press will belong to anyone able to post information for public retrieval. Of course, this implies that the network will be cluttered with illiterate ramblings, bigotry of all sorts, and vicious screeds. Well-meaning bureaucrats will no doubt try to control the clutter by screening works submitted for electronic publication — or, worse yet, by only allowing publication of works by “certified! authors. Again, censorship can recur under the best of intentions. By refusing the right of anyone to publicize information on a Worldnet, the government (or other controlling entity) declares its authority to refuse the right of everyone to publish. The path to TASS and Pravda, though not guaranteed, is clear.

Free Markets of the Mind

What can be done about these emerging threats to libertarian ideals? The doctrinaire answer would be to let the free market take its course and provide alternatives. In this case, however, that argument does not hold. By the mid-1990s, someone will be trying to bring a fiber optic cable to your doorstep. This “someone” may be your phone company, your cable TV company, your electric company, or some entity that does not yet exist. The economic realities are such that, once you are connected to the world with a single optical fiber cable, there is little incentive for a second entity to try and sign you up. High-bit- rate connections to the public network will be a de facto, if not de jure, monopoly. If your local serving entity chooses not to carry a particular service, the chances of your gaining access are slim. Similarly, the advantage of a single Worldnet is that all information be made accessible through one gateway. The Worldnet will evolve from the fusion of multiple new and existing networks, without a single point or moment of creation. The economics of setting up a duplicate competing Worldnet would be impossible for any entity smaller than a major government. With a monopoly architecture, the opportunity for free-market competition is non-existent. We must rely on the network itself to provide a free market for the mind.

Within a decade, therefore, the groundwork will be laid for a worldwide multimedia communications network that will drive the economies of the 21st century. With current technological and economic realities, it appears that this network will be liable to monopolistic control and censorship at both ends: the subscriber access and the central clearinghouse. What can be done? Precedents must be set now for stringent privacy restrictions and unfettered right of access to electronic databases. New legislation will need to be written, new international covenants will need to be agreed to. And libertarians everywhere must be vigilant against the forces of regulation — whether well-intentioned or malicious — coming to dominate our future means of communication, entertainment, and intellectual exchange… without firing a shot.

—4 December 1988

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