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Technology Stocks : Cisco Systems, Inc. (CSCO) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: At-a-boy who wrote (22746)	2/17/1999 4:12:00 PM
From: Frank Sheridan	Respond to of 77397

At-a-boy - you asked "tell me what the internetworking revolution is all about... in fact, I'm not sure I know what the PC revolution was..." OK - here is my humble interpretation of what the internetworking revolution is all about. Simply put, computers have revolutionized our society, they are used for countless tasks in countless formats. As useful as computers are when standing alone, they are even more useful when they are able to communicate with each other, hence "networking". This means that someone on computer "A" can access data on computer "B" over the network. Imagine how much better it is when you can connect not only to the computer next to you but to computers on the other side of the country. As you pointed out, the Internet is about thirty years old now. What has changed over the last thirty years is the amount of computational horsepower available to computer users and the speed vs. the cost of connecting to the Internet. Ten years ago you had to be an institution of some sort to be able to afford to connect to the Internet. Today Grandma can afford to browse the web and look up cookie recipes. This bring me to my third point... The trend toward total digitalization of all forms of information and entertainment in our society. In other works, things that we used to use and enjoy in analog formats (T.V., radio, movies, books, magazines, records etc.) are now available in digital formats (Laserdisk and DVD, streaming audio, web pages, CD's etc.) Once something is converted to a digital format the problem becomes how to get that digital data to the end user. Laserdisks and DVD players allow a home user to take a digitally encoded movie and play it on their home theater. Home Dish and DSS satellite systems transmit digital video to their subscribers. These formats exist today because they are efficient and cost effective ways to deliver large amounts of digital data to end users. However, speed increases and cost decreases for Internet service will eventually impact upon these formats and many others. One of the biggest plums for the picking is the $150+ billion dollar worldwide telecom equipment market, which is already starting to move over to an Internet based strategy (called "voice over IP - for voice over Internet Protocol). This market alone could represent tremendous growth for CSCO and LU, among others. So how is this going to impact you? Well, eventually "long distance" telephone calls will become a memory. Eventually people won't wait to watch a favorite TV show, they will instead wait for it to be posted and then they will download when they want to watch it. There are many other examples (telecommuting, teleconferencing, remote education programs, etc.) These will take a while to come about to full fruition, but incremental increases in the overall technology will facilitate the creation of new applications and new markets. In short, the Internet really will change everything, it just won't happen overnight. Regards.