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Technology Stocks : Ascend Communications (ASND) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sector Investor who wrote (38387)	3/8/1998 7:26:00 PM
From: Jack Colton	Respond to of 61433

This will of course take years to play out, just as today's PC took years to evolve from the original IBM PC of 1981 with it's 5MB hard drive. But the trend is just as inevitable. I agree ASND and MRVC are two of the best plays around, and that is where my money is invested also. But I remember October, 1981 when I bought my first IBM PC. The base unit (case, motherboard with 16KB, power supply and keyboard) was $1265. The monochrome adapter was $345. and the mono monitor was $340. There was not 5MB hard disk. There were 2ea 160KB floppies at some inflated price. I worked for Northern Telecom at the time as a Sales Engineer. I flew to the corporate hqrs, and showed them the PC, with my "Quote Generator" that I had written myself (I vaguely remember those long nights that started around supper time with my wife calling downstairs "Dinner's Ready!", and I would respond "OK, I'll be right up... let me make just one more change to this program...") Anyway, the people at Northern though I was nuts! But 3 months later, they wanted me and my PC back so we could provide a better looking proposal for the American Airlines online reservation system. I do not want to be interpreted to be like the Nortel managment who said I was nuts with this new thing - the PC - when it comes to Video Conferencing... I just think that the logical progression is voice first. That pays the way for the video to follow. IMO, we will not have widespread video until some time after the wide spread voice is in place. I am not stating that it has to be Voice over IP. It can be some other for of "DATA" voice. But the voice will come first. It is the first incremental step to a lot of other things that you can do with a digitized voice stream. This next generation of Operating Systems, with native ATM, may change a lot of things. But it is too early to start betting the farm on that. We have to wait and see what 3td party applications are built to take advantage of the incremental changes in the operating system. The quantum leaps in technology do not happen very often, but the incremental changes are continuously ongoing. In 1977, I paid $10,000 ea for a 9600 BPS modems. It was not until V.32 was developed that the price started to drop down towards the $2000 level and then all the way down below $1000. Now, most corporations don't even need the modem; the incoming modem signals are converted directly at the DS0 level with 24 modem channels in a single T-1. For large corporate applications, the modem has become obsolete, yet for personal use, the modem had grown to be in almost every home with a PC. From an investment standpoint, I try to line up the dominos, and guess where the next incremental step will be, and invest there before everyone else figures it out. Jack