These articles have been published in FORBES ASAP, commencing in April 11, 1994. They are a series excerpted from chapters in George Gilder's book, Telecosm, which will be published by Simon & Schuster, as a sequel to Microcosm, published in 1989 and Life After Television, published by Norton in 1992. Further chapters of Telecosm are scheduled to be published in future issues of Forbes ASAP.

The Coming of the Fibersphere
In a world of dumb terminals and telephones, networks had to be smart. But in a world of smart terminals, networks have to be dumb.Philip Hope, divisional vice president for engineering systems of EDS, has an IQ problem. His chief client and owner, General Motors, wants to interconnect thousands of 3-D graphics and computer aided engineering (CAE) workstations with mainframes and supercomputers at Headquarters, with automated assembly equipment at factories in Lordstown, Indiana, and Detroit, with other powerful processors at their technical center in Warren, Michigan, with their Opel plant in Ruesselheim, Germany, and with their design center outside San Diego. [Full text]

The New Rule of Wireless
At first glance, Vahak Hovnanian, a homebuilding tycoon in New Jersey, would seem an unlikely sort to be chasing rainbows. Yet in the converging realms of computers and communications that we call the telecosm, rainbows are less a matter of hue and weather than they are a metaphor for electromagnetism: the spectrum of wavelengths and frequencies used to build businesses in the Information Age. [Full text]

Issaquah Miracle
In the spring of 1989 when Michael Bookey first visited the Middle School in Issaquah, Wash., to help the school system with its computers, he was reminded of his early ventures into Communist China. After 20 years of working with computer networks, to enter Issaquah seemed to me like encountering an exotic tribe of primitives untouched by the modern world. [Full text]

Metcalfe's Law and Legacy
The world of networks breaks into two polar paradigms. Most familiar is the Public Switched Telephone Network. From the tiniest transistor flip-flop on a modem chip through labyrinthine layers of rising complexity on up to a 4ESS supercomputer switch linking 107,520 telephone trunk lines (itself consisting of millions of interconnected transistors), the public network is a vast, deterministic web of wires and switches. [Full text]

Digital Dark Horse—Newspapers
The perennial question of all suitors of fate and fortune now whispers and resounds through conference resorts, executive retreats and consulting sessions across the land as business leaders from Hollywood to Wall Street pose with pundits and ponder the new world of converging technologies. Symbolized in a famous mandala by MIT’s Media Lab, this grand fondue of information tools—to be served la carte on a flat-panel screen—is foreseen to be a $3.5 trillion feast for American business sometime early next century. [Full text]

Life After Television, Updated
In 1994, four years after I wrote the first edition of Life After Television, the cornucopian afterlife is indeed at hand. With microchips and fiber optics eroding the logic of centralized institutions, networks of personal computers are indeed overthrowing IBM and CBS, NTT and EEC. But as the great pyramids of the broadcast and industrial eras—the familiar masters of the American immigration—break apart, new fear and anxieties arise about the future. [Full text]

Auctioning The Airways
Imagine it is 1971 and you are chair of the new Federal Computer Commission. This commission has been established to regulate the natural monopoly of computer technology as summed up in the famous Grosch’s Law. In 1956 IBM engineer Herbert Grosch proved that computer power rises by the square of its cost and thus necessarily gravitates to the most costly machines. According to a famous IBM projection, the entire world could use some 55 mainframes, time-sharing from dumb terminals and keypunch machines. [Full text]

Washington's Bogeymen
Big Government and Mass Media always feed on fear of monsters. While politicians promise to protect the people from the dreaded private sector, leading newspapers such as the Washington Post and network shows such as “60 Minutes” chime in with continuing reports on the economy as seen from the shores of Loch Ness. [Full text]

Ethersphere
New low earth orbit satellites mark as decisive a break in the history of space-based communications as the PC represented in the history of computing. Pay attention to much-maligned Teledesic. Backed by Craig McCaw and Bill Gates, it is the only LEO fully focused on serving computers. [Full text]

The Bandwidth Tidal Wave
Craig Mundie of Microsoft thinks that Tiger, his video-on-demand operating system, signals a fundamental shift in the computer industry. Ruling the new era will be bandwidth measured in billions of bits per second rather than in the millions of instructions per second of current computers. [Full text]

Gilder Meets His Critics
The "Critics" comments in this article and the response by George Gilder, provides third party opinions and analysis that has not heretofore been available in the long running Telecosm Series. [Full text]

Mike Milken & The Two Trillion Dollar Opportunity
It's time to deregulate America's telecom infrastructure. And let the creative destroyers go to work. MICHAEL MILKEN IS BACK! Back, so the story goes, from the orgies of ‘80s greed, back from the best-selling den of thieves, back from his preening at the predators' ball, back from soft time at Pleasanton pen, back from prostate cancer and plagues of litigation, back to tell his own book to William Novak and to buy his redemption with the spoils of his crimes. [Full text]

From Wires To Waves
U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska wants to know: With deregulation of telecommunications, who will bring connections to Unalakleet, to Aleknagik and to Sleetmute? Who will bring 500 channels up the Yukon with the salmon to the people in Beaver? What will happen to the Yupik, the Inupiat and the Inuit? Will we leave them stranded in the snow while the world zooms off to new riches on an information superhighway? [Full text]

The Coming Software Shift
What will it take to launch a new Bill Gates—an Archimedean man who sharply shifts the center of the sphere, alters the axes of technology and economy, and builds a new business empire on new foundations? Who can inherit the imperial throne in the microcosm and telecosm currently held by the Redmond Rockefeller? [Full text]

Angst And Awe On The Internet
Well, it had to happen. As the Internet emerges as the central nervous system of global capitalism, the Luddite left is bursting into "flames" against the microcosm and telecosm, against interlinked computers and the global radiance of electromagnetic communications. [Full text]

Goliath At Bay
Goliath in the vale of Elah roared his contempt at the weapons and zeal of David: "Do you think me a dog that you contest me with sticks and stones?" [Full text]

Feasting On The Giant Peach
What is all this commotion in Massachusetts? The very source of the ARPAnet at Bolt, Beranek & Newman—the cradle of the Internet—Massachusetts is falling to the forces of Auntie Spiker and Aunt Sponge. [Full text]

Fiber Keeps Its Promise
Today, communications technologies are unleashing the Internet as the definitive force of a new industrial era, rendering the CPU peripheral and the net central. This "paradigm shift" is fundamental to comprehending the advent of the Telecosm. [Full text]

Inventing The Internet Again
For the first time in his life as an engineer, Paul Baran was "scared stiff." That can happen to people who stumble too close to the abyss of 20th-century history and look over the edge. Born in 1926 in a house in a corner of Poland that had been claimed by three different nations during his parents’ tenure, brought to America by his family at the age of 2, Baran was a child of European tempests. [Full text]