Dear Mr. Gilder,
No arguments with the changing scale, and relative
significance, of atomic and photonic measures and
things.
When I was a teen, just barely <g>, a two-transistor
Emmerson radio the size of a deck of playing cards fit
neatly into my shirt pocket. It set me apart from
the crowd for about a week, due to the novelty of it
all... until the Panasonics and Sonys hit the stores
with a vengeance.
Aside from its status symbol value...
...to me, a mere two transistors had a huge 'incremental'
value associated with them, in _real_ terms, since it
meant that I no longer had to lug around this huge,
brown, vacuum tube Radio King on the subways,
and to the beach. And nine-volt batteries were a far
cry better than getting an extension cord connected to
the deli shop under the boardwalk. I didn't have to do
a cost-benefit analysis on this. MTBF? Didn't matter.
The Transistors were now the radio king. They won the
contract. Hands down.
The Vacuum Tube is dead. Long live the Transistor.
That was then. Let's zip through Viet Nam, the
Moon Shots, the Market Crash of '87, Boy George,
Netscape, and directly to the present. (A shrink
would have a ball with that list...)
Today I have millions of transistors on my
desktop, and even though my 'machine' is more
powerful than an IBM main frame of the late 80s,
I feel, at times, that it puts me behind the
8-ball in both functionality and speed. I chalk
this up to today's neuroses engendered by a point
and click mentality which has become commonplace.
Five years ago a 14.4 modem was seen as a
lavish expense for simply attaching to a shell
account or to CompuServe.
Today I sometimes have problems downloading a
WSJ article from the Internet over a T-1. And
multi-media hasn't even arrived yet, to speak of.
There is no real sweat and toil, anymore. These
are only metaphors for other qualities we have
come to know.
Enlighten me, please, and I ask you this with only the
best intentions, because I think that I may have missed
something, based on your statement to me. Are you saying
that you don't promote the notion that bandwidth will
at some point become so abundant at the optical layer
that it would eventually become free, or virtually free?
I can recall being entranced with your Beyond the
Fiber Sphere article five or six years ago... I couldn't
put it down... read it twice in one sitting... because it
struck so many familiar chords which, at the time, I
felt only carrier folks would even be interested in!
But that was six long Internet years ago, prior to
the debut of the www as we now know it.
For that article, and for the many others that you
have written ( I think that I've read most of them, at
least the ASAP ones), I thank you for the
inspirational value that you have availed yourself of.
Even if at times I didn't fully agree with, or fully
understand some of your more subtle points, which are,
at times, and like you say, asymtotes and heuristics.
Best Regards,
Frank Coluccio |
