From the Silicon Valley to the Silicon Alley to right here on the banks of the Silicon Bayou there are Silly-cons aplenty. As this year winds down we can take a look at old number 97 and try to get a fix on 98. Looking back gets harder each year and peek ing into the future is even harder.
For one thing, keeping up with technology out here on the bleeding edge requires regular transfusions of plasma. The slopes are getting more slippery with each tick of the clock. We live at a time when over ninety percent of all the scientists, engineers , and inventors that ever lived are still alive. They are busy doing what they always have done and their ranks are doubling every two decades. The big-bang is happening right here on Mother earth.
Add in rapid communications, networking and the fact that computer chips are made largely out of melted sand and you begin to get the picture. With all those scientists and engineers around to give birth to the inventors’ imaginations, coupled with the a bility to make computers out of dirt, this practically guarantees that their price will continue to drop for at least into the next millennium. It doesn’t take a genius to predict that technology is going to take us places we have never even dreamed of. Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy flight.
1997 was the year that the Internet became ubiquitous, a place to conduct business and store company assets. Hackers, crackers, snoops, spoofers, spammers and scammers all flocked to the ’Net, giving new meaning to the phrase “electronic frontier.” Where ’s marshal Dillon when you need him?
The year started off like it ended, in court. Cyber Law is the growth industry of the nineties and that is not likely to change with the dawning of a New Year. I have been following and reporting on this phenomenon referred to as the Internet since it’s been around and as far as I can tell the only group of people getting rich are the lawyers. Hang your cyber shingle on the walls of your virtual office and start suing.
Sue everyone! If a domain name even closely resembles a copyright, trademark or service mark, sue ‘em. If a small computer company operating under the name RoadRunner decides to take it on-line with roadrunner.com, sue ‘em. At last tally there are thousa nds of lawsuits in this field of domain name controversy alone. The Communications Decency Act accounted for over a dozen more. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 is going to set new records in the “sue their pants off” game. I started the year as part o f a committee set up by the FCC to study how best to implement the Telecommunications Act but after spending seventeen straight days listening to lawyers argue over the word “and” I hung it up. I have take a solemn vow. I will never even call anyone in our Nation’s Capital again, let alone visit. If I happen to be on a plane, and for some reason it has to divert to Washington, DC, I will jump out.
Lawsuits continued with Microsoft suing everyone and everyone suing Microsoft. Of course the year is ending with the Justice Department getting into the act and suing the Microsofties. Lawsuits by, for, of and against Microsoft is the second largest grow th industry in the universe.
While on the subject of lawsuits, the adventures of Symantec and McAfee were a highlight of my year. For some reason I am on every Spin-Doctor’s Rolodex. Spin Doctors like to refer to themselves as PR people but their real job is to make us believe up is down and left is right.
For several months this year, starting in late June, my e-mail and fax were suffering meltdown with the overload this duo placed on it. It started when Symantec charged McAfee with using Symantec code in its VirusScan and PC Medic 97 product line. McAfee fired back by suing Symantec for defamation and tort of business interference. This suit became a little ambiguous when McAfee admitted that its products contain code misappropriated from Symantec Corporation. This volley continued throughout the summer with Symantec finally winning some “non-specified” judgment against McAfee and McAfee pressing their lawsuit against Symantec until finally McAfee apologized to Symantec and Symantec apologized to McAfee. It ended when, are you ready for this, when Hilg raeve, the developer of the HyperTerminal program that comes bundled with Windows 95 and Windows NT, sued both Symantec and McAfee. Hilgraeve said that both companies infringed upon its patent for in-transit anti-virus detection technology.
What a hoot. Everybody sues everybody else and who wins? You guessed it, the lawyers.
On the technology front CPU technology took a quantum leap with the announcement of Pentium II MMX from Intel and K6 MMX from AMD. Intel led off and AMD followed up with a cheaper version said to rival performance of the Pentium II for approximately twen ty-five percent less cost. Every move Intel made AMD trumped until they finally said they were committed (committed?) to pegging the price point of the K6 chip to anywhere from twenty-five to forty percent less than the Pentium II.
As the year winds down we are seeing the emergence of truly useful technologies such as handwriting and continuous speech recognition. No longer are we slaves to the keyboard, we can now write or speak in a natural environment to enter data into a comput er. Speech recognition software is available that will allow dictation at the rate of over two hundred words a minute with ninety-seven percent accuracy.
What does the future bring? What great new advances will we see in 1998? Well, for one thing, video and sound compression techniques will allow for the greater usability of video and voice over the Internet. Technology really does make for strange bedfel lows and this ménage à troisis certainly no exception. By mid ‘99 video e-mail will be the norm. Your ability to carry on video conferences over the Internet will be as simple as firing up your web browser and almost as cheap. Already you can buy color digital cameras for under two hundred dollars and by year’s end they will plummet to around seventy-five dollars. Faster, smaller and cheaper will continue to be the watchwords.
The trend of the Web replacing traditional media will continue. Already the WWW has replaced television as a source of news in over thirty percent of American homes and has replaced books and magazines in just under thirty percent. It is expected that th is trend will continue to increase and become around forty-five percent by year’s end. In addition, more people than ever before will use the Internet as their shopping mall. In January of ‘97 Dell computers reported that sale of PCs through their Web wa s on the order of one million dollars a day increasing to over two million by year’s end.
Well there we have it. Lawyers will continue to do lawyer stuff, spin doctors will continue to spin, technology will continue to multiply at ever-increasing levels, government will continue to enact laws that are redundant and unconstitutional, the Inter net will continue to grow like wildfire, and I will be back next month report on all of it. Life goes on.
Al Massey is a HAL-PC member.
E-mail me at webmaster@hal-pc.org with any comments you have and tell me what you want to see here.