Hi. I’m Nathan Myhrvold, and I’m gonna talk to you today about roadkill on the information highway. Now, any sufficiently complex and interesting topic is always reduced to a series of silly cliches. And so it is with a set of technology that winds up being referred to in the press as the information highway.
When you’re presented with a choice, you either have to completely choose the silly cliché, or wallow in it, and you’ll see we’ll probably wallow in it a little bit today. But there’s a very serious issue here, which is how does computing and communication come together to change our world? How will that change the landscape for the people involved competitively there? How will it change the technology? And ultimately, how will it change society itself?
Now, the foundations of this information highway phenomena really rest on two fundamental technologies. VLSI, the chip technology that gives the raw power to computing, and software, which harnesses that raw power for end users’ needs. I’m primarily a software guy, but we’ll talk a bunch about hardware today because it’s very important to understand what capabilities the hardware is gonna provide for us.