Telecom/1996-04-telecom-walnutcreek.iso/george.gilder.essays/issaquah.miracle

Text File | 1994-12-20 | 39KB | 779 lines

Reply-To: [e-mail] (Gordon Jacobson)
Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1993 16:01:29
Subject: Gilder' Article - Issaquah Miracle
From: [e-mail] (Gordon Jacobson)


>     Following yesterday's upload of "New Rule of Wireless," here is
>the third article in George Gilder's series.  This is the second of
>four articles I would like to upload to comp.dcom.telecom.  I
>contacted the author and Forbes and as the preface below indicates
>obtained permission to post on the Internet. Please note that the
>preface must be included when cross posting this article to another
>newsgroup. The following was received directly from Forbes ASAP on
>Wednesday October 27, 1993.

>Date:     Wed Oct 27, 1993  9:17 pm  GMT
>From:     Forbes ASAP / MCI ID: 579-9624
>
>
>TO:       Gordon Jacobson
>Subject:  PLEASE UPLOAD TO INTERNET
>
>
>
>
>     The following article, ISSAQUAH MIRACLE, was first published
>in Forbes ASAP, June 7, 1993.  It is a portion of George Gilder's
>book, Telecosm, which will be published next year by Simon &
>Schuster, as a sequel to Microcosm, published in 1989 and Life
>After Television published by Norton in 1992.  Subsequent
>chapters of Telecosm will be serialized in Forbes ASAP.
>

>
>                        ISSAQUAH MIRACLE
>
>                               BY
>
>                          GEORGE GILDER
>
>          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.
>
>     The only sign of modern technology was a forlorn computer
>room full of Radio Shack TRS-80 machines, most of which had
>broken down.  Then he learned that as a remedy for this problem,
>the district had recently voted a levy of $2.7 million for
>outlays on high technology.
>
>     Lacking any better ideas, the school system had decided to
>distribute the money equally among the teachers, to spend as they
>wanted.  What they wanted turned out to be VCRs, incompatible CD-
>ROM drives and a random selection of computers, printers and
>other gear to be scattered through the schools under the
>influence of a flock of computer salespeople attracted to the
>site by the pool of mandated money.
>
>     To Bookey, this remedy seemed worse than the disease.  It
>meant that the bulk of the money would be wasted, further
>estranging both taxpayers and students from the most powerful
>technologies of their era.  Bookey wanted school officials to
>know that the most powerful technology is not computers, but
>computers joined in networks.
>
>     Explaining the magic of networks, Bookey asks you to imagine
>a car plumped down in the jungle.  Checking it out, you might
>find it a very useful piece of equipment indeed.  A multipurpose
>wonder, it would supply lights, bedding, radio communications,
>tape player, heat, air conditioning, a shield against arrows and
>bullets, and a loud horn to frighten away fierce animals.  In awe
>of the features of this machine, you might never realize that the
>real magic of a car comes in conjunction with asphalt.
>
>     For the first 10 years of the personal computer era,
>according to Bookey, we have used our computers like cars in the
>jungle.  We have plumbed their powers for processing words and
>numbers.  All too often, home computers have ended up in the
>closet unused.  We have often failed to recognize that most of
>the magic of computing stems from the exponential benefits of
>interconnection.
>
>     In the microcosm, the interconnections come on individual
>chips, as ever smaller transistors crammed ever closer together
>work faster, cooler and cheaper, enhancing both the capability
>and the speed of the processor.  The microcosm strewed some 100
>million personal computers around the world and endowed
>individuals at workstations with the creative power of factory
>owners of the Industrial Age.
>
>     Just as the microcosm generates exponential gains from
>increasing connections on chips, the telecosm generates
>exponential gains by increasing connections between chips,
>powerful microcomputers in themselves.  These links between
>increasingly potent microchips will soon dominate the world of
>communications.
>
>     The networking industry therefore faces a drastic transition
>from a people-to-people regime to computer-to-computer.  This
>change is so radical that it resembles a mutation that creates a
>new species.  People communicate in domains of time and space
>entirely alien to the world of computers.  To a person, a one-
>second delay on a voice line seems hardly noticeable; to a
>computer, one second may mean a billion computations that would
>take hundreds of human lifetimes to accomplish by hand.
>
>     Most important, people can transmit or receive only a small
>stream of information at a time.  They want relatively narrow
>bandwidth connections for a relatively long period, a 64-kilobit-
>per-second voice link, for example, for a 10-minute phone call.
>
>     Computers, on the other hand, can handle hundreds of
>millions or even billions of bits a second.  They often need many
>millions of bits of bandwidth for a short time fractions of
>seconds.  As industry shifts from a human scale of time and space
>to a computer scale, the systems and structures in existing
>telephone and broadcast networks become almost irrelevant.
>Essentially, all other forms of networks: voice, text, video and
>sound, are rapidly giving way to various new forms of multimedia
>computer networks.
>
>     Driving this overwhelming force of change is the alchemy of
>interconnections, working in the telecosm with the same logic and
>feedback loops as connections in the microcosm.  hile dumb
>terminals such as phones and TVs use up bandwidth without giving
>anything back, computers are contributors to bandwidth, not
>consumers of it.
>
>     In general, the more computers, the more bandwidth.  Not
>only is the network a resource for each new computer attached to
>it, but each new computer is also a resource for the network.
>Each new computer expands the potential switching and processing
>capacity of the system by a large multiple of the increasing
>demands it makes on other switches and processors.
>
>     As ever more powerful computers are linked ever more
>closely, whether in digital cellular microcells or in webs of
>fiber and coaxial cable, usable bandwidth expands explosively.
>Governing the expansion of networks, the law of the telecosm is
>just as potent as the law of the microcosm.  Indeed, in enhancing
>the productivity of organizations, the telecosm consummates the
>microcosmic miracle.
>
>
>
>Microsoft Windows for Jungle Cars
>
>
>     The creator in the early 1970s of what may have been the
>world's first fully functioning system of corporate electronic
>mail, Bookey was quick to foresee this radical shift from person-
>to-person to computer-to-computer communications.  Pursuing his
>vision of networks, Bookey in 1982 spurned a possible job at
>Microsoft on the grounds that the company was outfitting cars for
>the jungle, a decision that probably cost him several million
>dollars.
>
>     Instead, he joined Seafirst Bank in Seattle, where he made
>history (in the form of a reference in John Sculley's
>autobiography, Odyssey) by pushing the purchase of a thousand
>Macintosh computers for bank networks at a crucial time for
>Apple.
>
>     In 1986 Bookey left the bank to join Doelz Co., a startup in
>Irvine, Calif., that built advanced computer network equipment
>that he had used at Seafirst.  For Doelz, Bookey designed
>software and spearheaded marketing.  A so-called cell-based
>network, the Doelz system broke up a stream of data into short,
>equal-sized packets, each with its own address, to be sent
>through the nodes of the net in nanoseconds, like letters
>accelerated a trillionfold through the branches of the post
>office.
>
>     Bookey was not necessarily wrong in choosing this technology
>over Microsoft's.  In the form of asynchronous transfer mode
>(ATM) systems, this essential approach, based on short, uniform
>packets that can be switched at gigabit speeds in hardware, is
>now the rage of planners in the computer networking industry.
>
>     ATM is seen as the crucial enabler for digital networks
>combining voice, data and video in so-called multimedia
>applications.  Bill Gates now calls multimedia the future of his
>industry.  Although many observers still see ATM as a futuristic
>technology, Bookey believes its future is nearly now.  From the
>humblest personal digital phone to the most advanced
>supercomputer, computer-to-computer links will dominate the
>entire universe of telecommunications, and ATM will dominate
>network switching.
>
>     Doelz, however, was ahead of its time and failed to survive
>a tangled legal imbroglio with AT&T in 1988.  So Bookey took a
>big profit on his California residence and returned with his wife
>Robin and daughter Erin to Seattle, where he had grown up and set
>records in the mile on the track at the University of Washington.
>He bought his dream house on the top of Cougar Mountain in
>Issaquah, with a view of the very Twin Peaks made famous in the
>television series and put out his shingle as a network consultant
>under the name Digital Network Architects (DNA).  Almost as an
>afterthought, the Bookeys sent Erin to Issaquah Middle School.
>
>     Having designed networks around the world, Bookey had often
>seen their powerful impact on business organizations, such as
>banks.  Bookey believed that networks could have a similar
>revitalizing impact on schools.  Like banks, schools are
>essentially information systems that have brought their
>Industrial Age hierarchy into the Information Age.
>
>     Creating networks in schools, however, posed many special
>problems.  Most school systems, like Issaquah, were largely
>unaccustomed to managing technology.  The system would need to
>create a large MIS (management information services) organization
>just to keep the network functioning.  Then, as the teachers at
>Issaquah hastened to point out to Bookey, there was the problem
>of students.  Impulsive, mischievous and messy, they in no way
>resembled the disciplined employees of a corporation.  Speaking
>from grim experience, some of the teachers told Bookey that his
>network plans would succeed only if the computers were reserved
>exclusively for teachers and if students were barred entirely.
>
>     Bookey, however, thought there had to be a way to bring the
>magic of networks to America's increasingly troubled school
>systems.  The secret would be to recognize that, just as
>computers are not consumers of but contributors to bandwidth,
>students should be seen not as a problem, but as a precious
>resource in launching the networks that inform the Information
>Age.
>
>
>
>Networks as Productivity Engines
>
>
>     Ever since Adam Smith first maintained that the division of
>labor, the spread of specialization, is the catalyst of the
>wealth of nations, economists have seen the breakdown of
>functions into subfunctions and specialties as the driver of
>efficiency and growth.  The key force expanding specialization in
>the contemporary capitalist economy is networks.  Indeed,
>networks, by their nature and purpose, refine the division of
>labor.
>
>     In the financial industry, for example, networks allowed the
>proliferation of specialized institutions.  In the ever-shifting
>kaleidoscopes of American finance, some institutions went local,
>some global.  Some managed car loans, credit cards or other
>consumer services; some handled mortgages, mutual funds or real
>estate trusts; still others stressed computer leases, junk bonds,
>venture capital or large corporate accounts.
>
>     The pell-mell fragmentation of American finance during the
>1980s into an ever more refined division of labor enabled the
>U.S. to lead the world in levels of capital efficiency, with more
>economic growth per dollar of savings than any other country.
>Each financial business did not have to repeat all the work of
>all the rest, and each became more efficient at a particular
>task.
>
>     Bookey believes that networks can have a similar effect on
>that other great information-processing industry: education.  Why
>should every school have an all-purpose library and a French
>teacher and a calculus scholar and a health center and an
>administrative office?  Why should every school have an entire
>complement of buildings?
>
>     With all the schools on networks, individual schools could
>specialize in particular subjects, functions and resources, as
>financial companies do.  Education would not have to happen
>exclusively, or even mostly, in schools.  The explosive spread of
>networks is now the prime mover of the U.S. economy, allowing all
>industries to break down into patterns of specialization unbound
>by place and time.  And now the government wants to get into the
>act.
>
>
>
>Superhighways in the Sky
>
>
>     Zoom through tax-hike tollgates and glide out onto data
>superhighways; this is the new mantra of American industrial
>policy.  Add the further fillip of investment for educational
>infrastructure and you can sweep up the ramp toward the federal
>treasury and drive out with a bonanza.
>
>     In this new era of the big bands, there are now some 10
>bills before Congress to foster vast new networks with large
>bandwidth, or communications capacity.  Some $2 billion has
>already been authorized and $765 million appropriated this year
>for various programs related to a National Research and
>Educational Network (NREN).
>
>     Candidate Bill Clinton presented the concept of NREN as Ra
>national information network to link every home, business, lab,
>classroom and library by the year 2015.  President Bill Clinton,
>vice-president Albert Gore and a raft of advisors all celebrate
>the highway as the metaphor for the future information economy.
>Gore points out that his father was a leader in building the
>Interstate Highway System in the early 1950s; Albert Jr., wants
>to play a key role in building the information highways of the
>1990s.
>
>     Indeed, data superhighways would seem to be the fulfillment
>of the fibersphere; the way to create the vast new infrastructure
>of fiber-optic lines that will bring the full promise of digital
>video and multimedia communications to all citizens.
>
>     Why, then, is Mike Bookey so worried?  He would seem to be
>the perfect NREN champion.  Bookey has pursued networks through
>most of his career and now is focusing on networks for education.
>In explaining the importance of computer connections, he has even
>long used Gore's favored highway metaphor.  Bookey thinks that
>the federal superhighwaymen do not grasp the nature of networks
>and how they grow.  In systems work we have a rule: You design
>top down, but you build bottom up.
>
>     Bookey sees the creation of networks as an organic process,
>driven by public demand, shaped by human needs and rooted in a
>moral universe of growth through sharing.  It is the experience
>of building the network that creates the expertise to maintain
>and use it.  In all these processes, big government is nearly
>irrelevant.
>
>
>
>None of the Above
>
>
>     For the past 10 years, Washington, D.C. experts have been
>wringing their hands over the supposedly unbearable costs of
>building broadband networks and the urgent need for large federal
>funding.  Analysts have been ruminating over the question of who
>would spearhead the creation of broadband nets; the phone
>companies, the cable television companies or the government.
>
>     Before any of these forces could act, however, it became
>clear that the answer would be none of the above.  The hardest
>part of the job was accomplished, with astonishing speed, by
>computer and networking companies.  The rest of the work is well
>under way, as cable and phone companies adopt the computer
>technologies.
>
>     As recently as 1989, only seven percent of America's
>personal computers were connected to local area networks.  By
>1991 45 percent were connected, and by 1993, close to two-thirds
>were linked to LANs.  Growing even faster than LANs is the
>internetworking business: the interconnection of existing local
>area nets in wide area networks.
>
>     Building internetworking gear or accessories, such companies
>as Cisco Systems, Cabletron, Wellfleet, 3Com and SynOptics are
>among the highest flyers in the technology stock market boom.
>Cisco, for example, is growing some 50 percent a year and
>commands a market value of almost $6 billion, comparable to that
>of Digital Equipment Corp.  Cabletron has hiked its revenues some
>16-fold in the last five years.
>
>     Most of these connections run at some 10 megabits per
>second, enough for high-resolution digital video, but inadequate
>for the more exotic traffic in images predicted for use later in
>the decade.  Increasingly, however, the connections are fiber-
>optic lines or are broadband coax, which is nearly as good as
>fiber for short-distance transport.  The potential of fiber is
>almost unlimited (see "Into the Fibersphere," Forbes ASAP,
>December 7, 1992).
>
>     Although moving more slowly than the computer firms,
>telephone and cable companies are rushing to lay fiber ever
>deeper into the nation's neighborhoods.  Spending some $2 billion
>(as much as NREN), Telecommunications Inc. (TCI) vows, according
>to CEO John Malone, to have 90 percent of its subscriber
>households served by fiber to the curb by 1995.
>
>     Bringing fiber into the local loop at a slower pace, the
>telephone companies, led by Bell Atlantic, also are forging ahead
>with ingenious new ways to make their twisted-pair copper
>connections carry as much as six megabits per second of digital
>information.  Wireless technology is also moving into the local
>loop for video delivery (see "The New Rule of Wireless," Forbes
>ASAP, March 29, 1993).
>
>     The U.S. networking industry is not in need of fixing.  The
>U.S. currently commands some three-fourths of all the world's
>LANs and perhaps 85 percent of its internetworks.  Although Gore
>and others justify their industrial policies by referring to the
>imperious plans of Japan, the U.S. currently commands about three
>times the computer power per capita as Japan, some 10 times as
>many computers attached to networks, and an installed base of
>broadband fiber and cable nearly 10 times as large.  The
>remarkable thing is that the U.S. government is so eager to fix a
>fabulously flourishing system that is the envy of the world.
>
>     The electronic and photonic networking industries actually
>resemble highways in only the most superficial way.  The highway
>construction trade has not advanced substantially in 50 years.
>By contrast, the networking trade is the fastest-moving part of
>the ever-accelerating computer industry and doubles its cost-
>effectiveness every year.  Although interconnecting government
>laboratories, contractors and supercomputer centers with fiber is
>desirable, a massive government network is not.  Issaquah offers
>better guidance for the future....  But first it will be
>necessary to deal with the abiding menace of the student problem.
>
>
>
>Overcoming the Student Problem
>
>
>     "What do you think you are doing?  Answer me," the voice
>insisted with the I've-got-you-squirming-now confidence of a
>teacher who has caught a pupil red-handed.
>
>     "Just lookin' around," grumbled Lee Dumas, the red-headed 13-
>year-old, trying to sound natural.  Glimpsing a telltale red
>screen of network management among the array of blue displays
>used in the keyboarding class, the teacher had walked up silently
>behind Dumas as he broke into the student lists, software
>programs and grades, and was on the verge of entering the
>administrative server.
>
>     Dumas was a bad kid.  No one at Maywood Middle School (one
>of the 16 campuses in Issaquah) doubted that.  His teachers
>called him "obnoxious" or even "brain-dead."  He set what he
>believes was an all-time record at Maywood by being detained
>after class some 60 times for insubordination.  Using the
>approved psychobabble, he says, "I had problems with authority.
>I couldn't accept teachers ordering me around."
>
>     After being caught breaking into the computer system, Dumas
>was dragged up to the principal's office.  Neither the teacher
>nor the principal could figure out the nature of the crime or
>judge its seriousness.  For help, they summoned Don Robertson,
>the administrator assigned to Issaquah's Technology Information
>Project (TIP).  He considered the situation gravely and
>recommended severe punishment.  Toward the end of the meeting,
>however, he turned to Dumas and said, "With your talent, you
>should become the sheriff rather than the outlaw.  Why don't you
>come down and join TIP?"  Since no one had previously detected
>any talent in Dumas, this comment made a sharp impression.
>
>     About a week later, he showed up sheepishly at Robertson's
>door.  To school administrators, kids like Dumas might be a
>problem, but to Bookey, Issaquah's 9,000 students seemed a
>wonderfully cheap resource.  By training the students to build
>and maintain the networks, he could make the $2.7 million the
>foundation of an enduring educational resource.
>
>     In the end, the Issaquah network was almost entirely built
>by students between the ages of 12 and 17.  Using students to
>solve the problems of network maintenance and support and thus
>reduce the real costs by some 80 percent was Mike Bookey's
>solution to the perplexing problem of computers in schools.
>
>     The first step in the Issaquah networking venture, in the
>spring of 1990, cost no money and arose from pure necessity.
>Just as in businesses across the country, the initial motive for
>networking was the arrival of laser printers from Hewlett
>Packard.  Bookey began by giving his 10-person TIP team a pile of
>manuals and having them install a basic network connecting two
>PCs, an Apple II and a Macintosh to a laser printer.  This step
>enhanced the value of all the computers at a small fraction of
>the cost of buying new dot-matrix printers for each.  Four of the
>ten students managed to cobble together the network in about a
>month.  They learned the intricacies of pulling twisted-pair
>wiring for 10baseT Ethernet computer connections running at the
>standard rate of 10 million bits (megabits) per second.
>
>     The next step was to add a hard disk containing school files
>and software programs.  Using both Apples and IBM PCs, the
>Issaquah network from the beginning, had to handle a variety of
>communications protocols.  If the network was to connect to
>anything outside itself to the school's administration building
>or the school system's libraries, for example, Issaquah would
>have to install equipment that could sort out messages from
>different computers.  This meant Issaquah joined the market for
>multiprotocol routers.  A router is a device that sits on a
>computer network and reads the addresses on all the message
>packets that pass by.  If the address is on another network with
>a different protocol, the router creates a new envelope for the
>packet and sends it to the other network.
>
>     Nonetheless, with all their routers and Ethernet wiring, the
>Issaquah networks slowed to a crawl as soon as they had to
>connect outside a building.  There, they had to depend on what is
>known as the Public Switched Telephone Network, where everything
>turns to analog and drowses down to some 2,400 bits per second.
>
>     Bookey demonstrated that the school could save money on its
>voice communications by buying a digital T-1 line that
>multiplexes 24 phone circuits onto a 1.544-megabit-per-second
>system.  Since 12 of the 24 circuits would be enough to satisfy
>the school's internal voice needs, the rest of the T-1 line, some
>760 kilobits per second, could be devoted to the data
>communications needs created by the school's new Ethernets.
>Thus, while getting a cheaper solution for its voice traffic, the
>school increased its data bandwidth by some sevenfold for free.
>
>     Once these connections were in place, the students acquired
>a Microsoft Mail program to incorporate E-mail in the system.
>Soon, this became the heart of the network, with both students
>and teachers using it constantly to handle papers, consult
>teachers in other schools in the system, make reports to the
>state and interact with parents and students.  E-mail became so
>central to the functioning of Issaquah that when the computers
>were down teachers would talk of canceling classes.
>
>     To E-mail were added connections to Internet, the global
>research and education network launched some 33 years ago as
>DARPA Net (the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects
>Agency).  Since Internet was civilianized in 1983, adopting the
>TCP/IP networking standard, it has been expanding its traffic at
>a pace of some 15 percent per month.  Between 1981 and 1992 the
>number of computers connected to Internet rose from 281 to 1.1
>million.  Through Internet, the students could search through a
>variety of databases for material for a paper or connect to Japan
>for help in learning Japanese.
>
>     Along with several other Issaquah students, Aaron Woodman,
>Jr., a burly boy with his long blonde hair in a ponytail, became
>so adept at using Internet that he now gives speeches to national
>conferences on the subject.  The speechmaking needs that grew out
>of the Issaquah project have imparted valuable lessons in English
>communications for the students.
>
>     All these developments did not occur without administrative
>resistance.  But the administration eventually became a prime
>beneficiary.  Soon, the computer networks in the Issaquah system
>were connected by a T-1 line to the Washington Schools
>Information Processing Cooperative (WSIPC) 20 miles north in
>Redmond, where attendance and other student records were kept for
>the entire state.
>
>     To make these WSIPC services more readily available to
>schools across the state, Bookey proposed the creation of a
>statewide educational network running on T-3 lines (45 megabits
>per second), now known as WEDNET.  This provides links all over
>Washington, from Shaw Island and Stehekin to Seattle and
>Issaquah, with a rogue line down to Portland, Oreg.
>
>     As for Lee Dumas, according to his mother, his situation has
>changed completely, "both in his attitude toward school and in
>the school's attitude toward him."  After joining TIP, Dumas
>became one of its most active and enthusiastic members.  Last
>summer, he got a job at the Computer Store in Seattle teaching
>the Macintosh HyperCard program to a student body consisting,
>yes, of public school teachers.  According to Dumas, they had no
>problem accepting his authority as a fledgling computer guru.
>
>     No longer one of the outlaws, Dumas became an official beta
>tester for the new Microsoft DOS 6.0 and Windows NT operating
>systems, specializing in their security procedures.  Following
>the path of another student who found the "Issaquah bug" in
>Microsoft's LAN Manager program, Dumas believes he found three or
>four bugs in NT.
>
>     Having just finished his sophomore year, Dumas has gone to
>work this summer at Microsoft for the company's network
>development chief, Brian Valentine, who regards this once brain-
>dead punk as a valued employee with high promise for the future.
>This student who floundered in the usual educational system
>flourished when his individual specialization was discovered.
>The Issaquah economy released his energies, just as the national
>economy releases its own energies through the specialization and
>division of labor in computer networks.
>
>     Since there are millions of Lee Dumases in the schools of
>America, many of them being given up for lost by analysts such as
>Labor Secretary Robert Reich, because they are not adept at the
>usual curriculum for "symbolic analysts," Dumas' redemption by
>technology bears crucial lessons.  The lessons are Bookey's:
>Students are a resource, not a rabble; specialized practical
>experience is more edifying than most textbook learning; networks
>are the critical technology both for economic growth and for
>educational renewal.
>
>     To these insights should be added Lewis Perelman's view, in
>his book "School's Out" (1992, Morrow), that teachers should
>increasingly abandon their role as a "sage on the stage" in favor
>of service as a "guide on the side," steering their students
>through a global cornucopia of educational resources.
>
>
>
>Education as a Network Driver
>
>
>     It may seem peculiar that Bookey, a network guru for large
>corporations like U.S. West, should focus his attentions on such
>problems as interconnecting school children in Issaquah with
>libraries in Bellevue, parents on Squaw Mountain, teachers across
>town and administrators at the Washington State Information
>Processing Cooperative.  Yet Bookey believes that the educational
>application may well drive the creation of a true national
>infrastructure of digital networks.
>
>     The networking problems of schools closely resemble the
>networking problems of a nation full of diverse systems.  To
>achieve their full promise, school networks must link computers
>of many varieties owned by parents, students and teachers, to
>administrative servers owned by state and local governments, to
>printers, libraries and databases.  School networks must connect
>LANs to IBM SNA (Systems Network Architecture) links, to a
>variety of telephone technologies, from T-1 lines of 1.5 megabits
>per second to T-3 lines at 45 megabits per second and, soon, to
>ATM switches and other potential gigabit systems.  In all its
>dimensions, including an acute financial constraint, this
>challenge is altogether as difficult as interconnecting
>supercomputers over fiber in an NREN.
>
>     Bookey relished this challenge at Issaquah.  Advocates of
>NREN might disparage Issaquah as a relatively low-grade network.
>After all, it currently has no fiber outside of the fiber links
>in the telephone network that it uses.  Without fiber, the
>network will not be able to accommodate collaborative learning in
>multimedia forms across the country.  Bookey demurs.  Buying a
>fiber-optic network before personal computer technology can
>manage broadband flows of data is premature.  In five years,
>fiber-optic links will probably cost about one-fifth of what they
>cost today.  When the network is needed, Issaquah will be able to
>purchase it and, more important, also use it.  Moreover, TCI
>recently offered to install fiber throughout the Issaquah school
>system for nothing as part of its general program of fiber to the
>curb.
>
>     The fact is that big-band technology will come to Issaquah
>in due course, with or without NREN money.  Critics, of course,
>will carp that Issaquah is a special case "a relatively rich
>community" that could afford to levy $2.7 million for technology.
>Yet the Issaquah example is galvanizing schools across the state
>of Washington and even in California and Arkansas, where Bookey
>and his colleague Mason Conner have been consulting with
>education officials.  Emulating Issaquah, other districts in
>Washington have since raised some $140 million for network
>ventures.
>
>
>
>Glass Ceiling for Networks?
>
>
>     The lesson of Issaquah is that data highways and
>superhighways, driven by the convergence of microcosm and
>telecosm, are indeed emerging in America, and at an astonishing
>pace.  They already are revitalizing the economy and society, and
>are helping to reform the system of education.  The only federal
>initiatives that will significantly assist the process are lower
>taxes, accommodation of Internet growth and use, and further
>deregulation of telecommunications.  Communication must begin
>locally, with access to the community.  From these local roots
>can emerge the great branching systems that can interconnect an
>information economy.
>
>     By starting from the top, the government risks paving over
>the pullulating fabric of networking enterprise with a glass
>ceiling of expensive and misplaced fiber.  In 1993 an estimated
>37 million personal computers will be sold worldwide.  The same
>forces that impelled the networks of Issaquah will drive the
>owners of these new PCs to interconnect them to other networks
>and will induce the owners of the networks to link them together.
>
>     As the centrifugal force of the microcosm, multiplying and
>distributing intelligence through the world, converges with the
>integrating power of the telecosm, the exponential miracles of
>specialization and growth will gain new momentum.  How far can
>this spiral reach?  Internet will soon approach some interesting
>limits.  According to International Data Group, the number of
>users has risen from 9,800 in 1986, all in the United States, to
>4.7 million around the world today.
>
>     At this pace, Internet will embrace the entire world
>population by the year 2001. That's one limit.  As the system's
>trunking backbone rises to 45 megabits per second on T-3 lines
>and above, the sky is the limit for the amount of message
>traffic.  In the first month after the enlargement to T-3 lines
>in October 1992, usage rose from 3.5 trillion bytes to 4 trillion
>bytes.  All these networks are dominated by text and still
>pictures.  But the miracles of Internet and Issaquah are about to
>be joined with a new miracle of growth in digital video
>connections in the local loop.
>
>
>
>          Bombshell from Time-Warner
>
>
>     How soon can this happen?  Advocates of NREN speak of this
>technology being consummated in 2015.  But to most politicians
>and businessmen, a projected date more than five years ahead is
>essentially a synonym for never-never land; a way of saying,
>"Forget about it. I'll be retired."
>
>     The fact is that a widespread system of two-way broadband
>networks reaching most American homes, schools and offices is
>less than five years away.  All U.S. business planners must come
>to terms with this transforming reality.  Announcements this
>spring from leading cable, telephone and computer companies; from
>TCI and U.S. West to IBM and Silicon Graphics; bring the shape of
>this network into clear focus.
>
>     Exemplary among plans announced by a variety of firms is
>Time-Warner's projected system in Orlando.  As described by Jim
>Chiddix, the company's college-dropout technical guru, the Time-
>Warner showcase venture will be a giant client/server computer
>network, suggestive of the arrangements now ubiquitous in
>corporate computing.  The wires will be a combination of fiber to
>the curb and coax to the home.  Much of the system's hardware and
>software will be supplied by computer companies (allegedly
>including IBM and Silicon Graphics).  The "client" computers will
>be digitized TVs or teleputers linked to powerful database
>computers that use a parallel-processing architecture to access
>hierarchical memory systems, from DRAM caches to optical disk
>archives.  These memories will contain terabytes (trillions of
>bytes) of digital video movies, games, educational software and
>other programming.
>
>     Perhaps the most dramatic breakthrough, though, will come in
>the switches.  While much of the computer and telephone world
>continues to dither about the future of ATM (many consigning it
>to the pits of 2015), Time-Warner is committed to installing ATM
>switches, built by AT&T, beginning next year in Orlando.  The ATM
>system will allow Time-Warner to offer telephone, teleputer and
>multimedia services together, as soon as the regulators allow it.
>Chiddix predicts that ATM will soon gravitate to local area
>networks and ultimately become ubiquitous.
>
>     But the most portentous announcements of all have come from
>the telephone companies, who have the most to lose from this
>cable-oriented network design.  Both U.S. West and Pacific Bell
>have disclosed that they are adopting a combination architecture
>of fiber and coaxial cable closely resembling the Time-Warner and
>TCI projects.  This unexpected action by two leading Baby Bells,
>of turning their backs on their millions of miles of twisted-pair
>copper wires shows both the boldness of the new telephone company
>leadership and the imperious power of this digital technology.
>
>     From all sides the telecommunications and computer
>industries are converging on one essential configuration of
>advanced parallel-processing hardware, client/server database
>software and ATM switching.  As microcosm and telecosm converge
>in the living room, with interactive digital video and
>supercomputer image processing, the leading edge of the digital
>revolution moves from millions of offices toward billions of
>homes.  Just as Michael Milken, then of Drexel Burnham Lambert,
>and the late William McGowan of MCI in 1983 rescued long-distance
>fiber optics from the never-never lands of the year 2015 to which
>AT&T had consigned it, John Malone of TCI, Gerald M. Levin of
>Time-Warner and Richard D. McCormick of U.S. West in 1993 have
>burst open the floodgates for fiber and ATM in the local loop
>
>     Again, the force behind this revolutionary development was
>fierce business and technical rivalry in the marketplace.  In the
>real world the ruling principle of network development is not
>imposed standardization by government but spontaneous order.  It
>springs from the interplay of human creativity and
>entrepreneurship with the inexorable laws of physics and
>technology.
>
>     These dynamics of interconnection in the Information Age
>will continue well into the next century.  The microcosm will
>yield chips containing billions of transistors, equivalent to
>scores of supercomputers on single slivers of silicon.  The
>telecosm will yield bandwidth exploding into the terahertz of all-
>optical networks and the gigahertz of millimeter waves in the
>air.
>
>     Provided that rulers and regulators do not stifle this
>spiral of opportunity, the human spirit "emancipated and thus
>allowed to reach its rarest talents and aspirations" will
>continue to amaze the world with heroic surprises.  The Issaquah
>miracle of Mike Bookey and Lee Dumas and all the others, and the
>continuing miracle of American networks, which was entirely
>unexpected by the world, will repeat themselves again and again
>in new forms of entrepreneurship and technology.
>
>