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 Wired, November 1995 Auguring the Matrix Futurist george Gilder sees the Internet as the next stage of the PC revolution. By Jeff Ubois George Gilder has been offering up surprising visions of future technology spiced with political commentary for more than a decade. A graduate of Harvard University, he majored in government, studied under Henry Kissinger, and later taught as a fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Politics. He is the author of 10 books, including Microcosm (1988), Life After Television (1990), and the forthcoming Telecosm, as well as a contributing editor to Forbes ASAP and a fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute, a futurist think tank with a free-market bent. He also is a co-author with Esther Dyson, George Keyworth, and Alvin Toffler of the Progress and Freedom Foundation's Cyberspace and the American Dream: A Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age, which has served to inform the political establishment associated with Newt Gingrich about Net-related issues. A former political speech writer for Richard Nixon, Robert Dole, Nelson Rockefeller, David Rockefeller, and others, Gilder is a staunch advocate of technical and free-market approaches to extending the reach of new technologies. In Gilder's world, government usually is the problem rather than the solution. INTERNET WORLD: What's your high-level view of the Internet? What is the Net going to look like in a year or two and what's going to drive its evolution? GEORGE GILDER: A fundamental change is taking place in the computer industry: The functions that were once on your CD-ROM and hard drive are now on the network, and this is an immense transformation. To sum up this development, the law of the microcosm, which has governed the growth of the personal computer industry from the beginning, is converging with the law of the telecosm. The law of the microcosm ordains that if you take any number (n) of transistors and put them on a single sliver of silicon, you get n-squared performance. Because Moore's Law predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months, you get a fourfold rise in computer power every 18 months. The industry has been a Moore's Law phenomenon. Moore's Law is accelerating in its impact, and the number of transistors in each doubling is much larger. In addition, the pace of increase in the number of transistors in a chip is—if anything—increasing, and, at the same time, the computer industry is making architectural advances based on increasing parallelization. So you have a continuation and acceleration of the power of Moore's Law, the law of the microcosm. This is compounded with the law of the telecosm. It is associated with [Ethernet inventor Bob] Metcalfe's Law, which says that if you take any number (n) of computers—and this is my translation—and interconnect them in networks, you get n-squared performance and value. This is not just the number of computers, it's also the power of the computers, so Moore's Law is kind of subsumed by the law of the telecosm, and you get another exponential increase. When you consider the immense power that the Internet imparts to a personal computer, you are no longer restricted to the functions that are performed on your own hard drive, CD-ROM, or processor. You can reach out across the Net and command the cycles of computers all around the world. Metcalfe's Law, the law of the telecosm, immensely enhances the power of individual computers, and we're just beginning to scratch the surface of this augmentation. People are exploring and experimenting, but as far as making the Internet a really central part of their computer operations, it's happened only with e-mail. This year e-mail is going to outpace snail mail in total number of messages delivered. There are going to be about 95 billion e-mail messages and 85 billion ordinary postal messages in the United States. IW: That sounds a lot like Scott McNealy (founder and CEO of Sun Microsystems)—that the network is the computer. GILDER: This, of course, has been the Sun theme from the beginning. Sun extended it to the local area network, so the LAN became the computer, and that was the heart of Sun's huge growth. Now the whole Internet is becoming the computer, and that is an immense step function in the power of the machine. Sun was, of course, crucial to the growth of the Internet from the beginning. Bill Joy incorporated the TCP/IP stack into the Berkeley Unix release that he put on the Net in the early 1980s, and thus he essentially took the original TCP/IP and accelerated it for use on Ethernets. He really made a robust and efficient Internet possible. If we were still going at 50 kbps, which is what the original TCP/IP ran at, the Net couldn't have grown the way it has. So Sun has been at the heart of the Internet from the beginning, and Sun still has something like 56 percent of the Internet servers. IW: How important is Java? GILDER: Java is really a fundamental kind of change because it allows you to send not just information over the Net, but lets you also access programs. That is a fundamental and dramatic enhancement of the power of the Net. Java is a very good language, very well designed to perform this function. It's based on C++, so all the people who know C++ can readily adopt it. And new security functions have been added that make it the first language that's fully comfortable on the Internet. There will be other such languages introduced, but Sun is ahead at the moment in this fundamental enhancement of the Internet. IW: What will be the effects of continued expansion of the Internet's user base? GILDER: The personal computer owner who has devoted much of the last four or five years to increasing his efficiency and mastery of an array of programs now is moving onto the Net. Since some 50 million personal computers a year have been sold worldwide for four or five years, this has created an immense number of potential users of the Internet. A lot of these are corporate computers with various dedicated functions, but you still have perhaps 100 million computer users out there today who are capable of participating in the Internet—and will begin to do so over the next year. That's a huge development. We now have an estimated 30 million people on the Internet, and it's going to be over a 100 million within the next year. IW: What are some of the implications of that? GILDER: Microsoft will do wonderfully with its network, without really comprehending fully the import of the Internet, the import of Java, and a real kind of inversion of the computer world. In the past, the computer was the processor and the operating system, and now the computer is indeed, as Sun has prophesied, the network itself. It also means that the efforts of big conglomerate content companies to acquire conduits are misconceived because as the Internet gets more capacious and robust and broadband, the strategy of combining your content with a specific conduit—whether it's cable, direct-broadcast satellite, broadcast station, or a set of broadcast stations called a network—and trying to get essentially monopoly profits is doomed. [ page | | ||||
