The Road Ahead

4 APPLICATIONS AND APPLIANCES

When I was a kid, The Ed Sullivan Show aired at eight o’clock on Sunday nights. Most Americans with television sets tried to be home to watch it because it might be the only time and place to see the Beatles, Elvis Presley, the Temptations, or that guy who could spin ten plates simultaneously on the noses of ten dogs. But if you were driving back from your grandparents’ house or were on a Cub Scout camping trip, too bad. Not being home on Sundays at eight meant you also missed out on the Monday-morning conversations about the previous night’s broadcast.

Conventional television allows us to decide what we watch, but not when we watch it. The technical term for this sort of broadcasting is “synchronous.” Viewers must synchronize their schedules with the time of a broadcast sent to everyone. That’s how I watched The Ed Sullivan Show three decades ago, and it’s still how most of us will watch the news tonight.

In the early 1980s the videocassette recorder gave us more flexibility. If you cared enough about a program to fuss with timers and tapes in advance, you could watch it whenever you liked. You could claim from the broadcasters the freedom and luxury to serve as your own program scheduler—and millions of people do. A telephone conversation is also synchronous, because both parties must be on the line at the same time. When you tape a television show or let an answering machine record an incoming call, you are converting synchronous communications into a more convenient form: “asynchronous” communications.

It is human nature to find ways to convert synchronous communications into asynchronous forms. Before the invention of writing, 5,000 years ago, the only form of communication was the spoken word and audiences had to be in the presence of the speaker or they missed his message. Once the message could be written, it could be stored and read later by anyone, at his or her convenience. I am writing these words at home early in 1995, but I have no idea when or where you’ll read them.

One of the benefits bestowed by the information highway will be more control over our schedules. There will be many others. Once you make a form of communication asynchronous, you can also increase the variety and selection possibilities. Even viewers who rarely record television programs routinely rent movies. There are thousands of choices available at local video-rental stores for just a few dollars each, so the home viewer can spend any evening with Elvis, the Beatles—or Greta Garbo.

Television has been around for fewer than sixty years, but in that time it has become a major influence in the life of almost everyone in developed nations. But television, in some ways, was just a replacement for commercial radio, which had been bringing electronic entertainment into homes for twenty years. No broadcast medium is comparable to what the highway will be like.

The highway will enable capabilities that seem magical when they are described, but represent technology at work to make our lives easier and better. Because consumers already understand the value of movies and are used to paying to watch them, video-on-demand will be an important application on the information highway. It won’t be the first, however. We already know that PCs will be connected long before television sets and that the quality of movies shown on early systems will not be very high. The systems will be able to offer other applications such as games, electronic mail, and home banking. When high-quality video can be transmitted, there won’t be any intermediary VCR; you’ll simply request what you want from a long list of available programs. Limited video-on-demand systems are already installed in some higher-priced hotel rooms, replacing or complementing premium movie channels. Hotel rooms, airports, and even airplanes are great laboratories for all the new highway services that will come later into homes. They offer a controlled environment and an upscale audience for experimentation.

Television shows will continue to be broadcast as they are today for synchronous consumption. After they air, these shows—as well as thousands of movies and virtually all other kinds of video—will be available whenever you want to view them. You’ll be able to watch the new episode of Seinfeld at 9:00 P.M. on Thursday night, or at 9:13 P.M., or at 9:45 P.M., or at 11:00 A.M. on Saturday. If you don’t care for his brand of humor, there will be thousands of other choices. Your request for a specific movie or television program episode will register and the bits will be routed to you across the network. The information highway will make it feel as though all the intermediary machinery between you and the object of your interest has been removed. You indicate what you want, and presto! you get it.

Movies, television programs, and all sorts of other digital information will be stored on “servers,” which are computers with capacious disks. Servers will provide information for use anywhere on the network. If you ask to see a particular movie, check a fact, or retrieve your electronic mail, your request will be routed by switches to the server or servers storing that information. You won’t know whether the material that arrives at your house is stored on a server down the road or on the other side of the country, nor will it matter.

The requested digital data will be retrieved from the server and routed by switches back to your television, personal computer, or telephone—your information appliances. These digital devices will succeed for the same reason their analog precursors did—they will make some aspect of life easier. Unlike the dedicated word processors that brought the first microprocessors to many offices, these information appliances will be general-purpose, programmable computers connected to the information highway.

Even if a show is being broadcast live, you’ll be able to use your infrared remote control to start, stop, or go to any previous part of the program, at any time. If someone comes to your door, you’ll be able to pause the program for as long as you like. You’ll be in absolute control. Except, of course, you won’t be able to forward past part of a live show as it’s taking place.

Delivering movies and television programs is technically one of the simpler things to do. Most viewers can understand video-on-demand and will welcome the freedom it provides. It has the potential to be what in computer parlance is called the “killer application” for the highway. A killer application (or just “killer app") is a use of technology so attractive to consumers that it fuels market forces and makes an invention all but indispensable, even if it wasn’t anticipated by the inventor. Skin-So-Soft was just another lotion competing in a crowded market until someone discovered its insect-repelling qualities. Now it may still be sold for

its original application—to soften skin—but its sales have increased because of its killer app.

The phrase is new, but the idea isn’t. Thomas Edison was as great a business leader as he was an inventor. When he founded the Edison General Electric Company in 1878, he understood that to sell electricity he had to demonstrate its value to consumers—to sell the idea that light could fill a house day or night with just the flick of a switch. Edison lit up the public’s imagination with the promise that electric lighting would become so cheap that only the rich would buy candles. He correctly foresaw that people would pay to bring electric power into their homes so that they could enjoy a great application of electric technology—light.

Electricity found a place in most homes as a means of providing lighting, but a number of additional applications were added quite quickly. The Hoover Company greatly improved the early electric sweeping machine. Electric cooking was popularized. Soon there were electric heaters, toasters, refrigerators, washing machines, irons, power tools, hair dryers, and a host of other laborsaving appliances, and electricity became a basic utility.

Killer applications help technological advances change from curiosities into moneymaking essentials. Without killer apps an invention won’t catch on—witness such notable consumer-electronics flops as 3-D movies and quadraphonic sound.

In chapter 3, I mentioned that word processing brought microprocessors into corporate offices in the 1970s. At first it was provided by dedicated machines such as Wang’s, which were used solely for creating documents. The market for dedicated word processors grew incredibly fast, until it included more than fifty manufacturers, with combined sales of more than $1 billion annually.

Within a couple of years, personal computers appeared. Their ability to run different types of applications was something new. That was their killer app. A PC user could quit WordStar (for years one of the most popular word-processing applications) and start up another application, such as the spreadsheet program VisiCalc or dBASE for database management. Collectively, WordStar, VisiCalc, and dBASE were attractive enough to motivate the purchase of a personal computer. They were the killer applications.

The first killer application for the original IBM PC was Lotus 1-2-3, a spreadsheet tailored to the strengths of that machine. The Apple Macintosh’s killer business applications were Aldus PageMaker for designing documents to be printed, Microsoft Word for word processing, and Microsoft Excel for spreadsheets. Early on, more than a third of the Macintoshes used in business and many in the home were purchased for what became known as desktop publishing.

The highway will come about because of a confluence of technological advances in both communications and computers. No single advance would be able to produce the necessary killer applications. But together these will. The highway will be indispensable because it will offer a combination of information, education services, entertainment, shopping, and person-to-person communication. We can’t be sure yet exactly when all the necessary components will be ready. Easy-to-use information appliances will be critical components. In the years immediately ahead there will be a proliferation of digital devices that will take on different forms and communicate at different speeds. I’ll discuss them at length later. For the moment it’s enough to know that a variety of PC-like appliances will allow each of us to stay in touch over the highway with other people as well as with information. These will include digital replacements for many of the analog devices, including televisions and telephones, that surround us today. We can already be sure that the ones that are retained will be those that become indispensable. Although we don’t know which forms will be popular, we know they will be general-purpose, programmable computers connected to the information highway.

Many homes are already attached to two dedicated communications infrastructures: telephone lines and television cables. When these specialized communication systems have been generalized into a single digital-information utility, the information highway will have arrived.

Your television set will not look like a computer and won’t have a keyboard, but the additional electronics inside or attached will make it architecturally a computer like a PC. Television sets will connect to the highway via a set-top box similar to ones supplied today by most cable TV companies. But these new set-top boxes will include a very powerful general-purpose computer. The box may be located inside a television, behind a television, on top of a television, on a basement wall, or even outside the house. Both the PC and the set-top box will connect to the information highway and conduct a “dialogue” with the switches and servers of the network, retrieving information and programming and relaying the subscriber’s choices.

However much like a PC the set-top box becomes, there will continue to be a critical difference between the way a PC is used and a television is used: viewing distance. Today, more than a third of U.S. households have personal computers (not counting game machines). Eventually, almost every home will have at least one, connected directly to the information highway. This is the appliance you’ll use when details count or when you want to type. It places a high-quality monitor a foot or two from your face, so your eyes focus easily on text and other small images. A big-screen TV across the room doesn’t lend itself to the use of a keyboard, nor does it afford privacy, although it is ideal for applications that multiple people watch at the same time.

Set-top boxes and PC-interface equipment will be designed so that even the oldest TV sets and most current personal computers can be used with the highway, but there will be new televisions and PCs with better pictures. The images on today’s television sets are quite poor compared to pictures in magazines or on movie theater screens. While U.S. television signals can have 486 lines of picture information, they are not all distinguishable on most sets, and the typical home VCR can record or play back only about 280 lines of resolution. As a result, it is difficult to read the credits at the end of a movie on a television set. Conventional television screens are also a different shape from most movie theater screens. Our TVs have an “aspect ratio” (the relationship of picture width to height) of 4 by 3, meaning a picture is a third wider than it is tall. Feature films typically are made with an aspect ratio of about 2 to 1—twice as wide as they are tall.

High-definition television (HDTV) systems that offer more than 1,000 lines of resolution, with a 16-by-9 aspect ratio and better color, have been demonstrated, and they are beautiful to watch. But despite the efforts of the government and industry in Japan, where they were created, HDTV did not catch on, because it required expensive new equipment for both broadcasting and receiving. Advertisers wouldn’t pay extra to fund HDTV, because it doesn’t make ads measurably more effective. However, HDTV might still catch on, because the highway will allow video to be received at multiple resolutions and aspect ratios. This idea of adjustable resolution is familiar to users of personal computers who can choose the typical resolution of 480 (called VGA) or higher resolutions of 600, 768, 1,024, or 1,200 horizontal lines of resolution, depending on what their monitor and display card can support.

Both TV screens and PC screens will continue to improve—to get smaller and improve in quality. Most will be flat-panel displays. One new form will be the digital white board: a large wall-mounted screen, perhaps an inch thick, that will take the place of today’s blackboards and white boards. It will display pictures, movies, and other visual materials, as well as text and other fine details. People will be able to draw or make lists by writing on it. The computer controlling the white board will recognize a handwritten list and convert it into one with a readable typeface. These devices will show up first in conference rooms, then private offices and even homes.

Today’s telephone will connect to the same networks as the PCs and TVs. Many future phones will have small, flat screens and tiny cameras. Otherwise, though, they’ll look more or less like today’s instruments. Kitchens will continue to have wall phones, because they conserve counter space. You’ll sit close to the phone and look at a screen showing the person you are speaking to—or at a stock picture he or she has elected to transmit in lieu of live video. Technologically, the phone hanging over a dishwasher tomorrow will have a lot in common with the set-top box in the living room and the personal computer in the den, but it will assume the form of a phone. Under the hood, all information appliances will have pretty much the same computer architecture. Their exterior forms will be different to match their varying functions.

In a mobile society, people need to be able to work efficiently while on the road. Two centuries ago, travelers often carried a “lap desk,” a hinged writing board attached to a thin mahogany box with a drawer for pens and ink. When folded, it was reasonably compact, and when opened, it offered an ample writing surface. In fact, the Declaration of Independence was written on a lap desk in Philadelphia, a long way from Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia home. The need for a portable writing station is met today by the laptop, a folding, lap-size personal computer. Many people—including me—who work from both office and home, choose a laptop (or a slightly smaller computer, known as a notebook) as their primary computer. These small computers can then be connected to a large monitor and to the corporate network in the office. Notebook computers will continue to get thinner until they are nearly the size of a tablet of paper. Notebooks are the smallest and most portable real computers today, but soon there will be pocket-size computers with snapshot-size color screens. When you whip one out, no one will say, “Wow! You’ve got a computer!”

What do you carry on your person now? Probably at least keys, identification, money, and a watch. Quite possibly you also carry credit cards, a checkbook, traveler’s checks, an address book, an appointment book, a notepad, reading material, a camera, a pocket tape recorder, a cellular phone, a pager, concert tickets, a map, a compass, a calculator, an electronic entry card, photographs, and perhaps a loud whistle to summon help.

You’ll be able to keep all these and more in another information appliance we call the wallet PC. It will be about the same size as a wallet, which means you’ll be able to carry it in your pocket or purse. It will display messages and schedules and also let you read or send electronic mail and faxes, monitor weather and stock reports, and play both simple and sophisticated games. At a meeting you might take notes, check your appointments, browse information if you’re bored, or choose from among thousands of easy-to-call-up photos of your kids.

Rather than holding paper currency, the new wallet will store unforgeable digital money. Today when you hand someone a dollar bill, check, gift certificate, or other negotiable instrument, the transfer of paper represents a transfer of funds. But money does not have to be expressed on paper. Credit card charges and wired funds are exchanges of digital financial information. Tomorrow the wallet PC will make it easy for anyone to spend and accept digital funds. Your wallet will link into a store’s computer to allow money to be transferred without any physical exchange at a cash register. Digital cash will be used in interpersonal transactions, too. If your son needs money, you might digitally slip five bucks from your wallet PC to his.

When wallet PCs are ubiquitous, we can eliminate the bottlenecks that now plague airport terminals, theaters, and other locations where people queue to show identification or a ticket. As you pass through an airport gate, for example, your wallet PC will connect to the airport’s computers and verify that you have paid for a ticket. You won’t need a key or magnetic card key to get through doors either. Your wallet PC will identify you to the computer controlling the lock.

As cash and credit cards begin to disappear, criminals may target the wallet PC, so there will have to be safeguards to prevent a wallet PC from being used in the same manner as a stolen charge card. The wallet PC will store the “keys” you’ll use to identify yourself. You will be able to invalidate your keys easily, and they will be changed regularly. For some important transactions, just having the key in your wallet PC won’t be enough. One solution is to have you enter a password at the time of the transaction. Automatic teller machines ask you to provide a personal identification number, which is just a very short password. Another option, which would eliminate the need for you to remember a password, is the use of biometric measurements. Individual biometric measurements are more secure and almost certainly will be included eventually in some wallet PCs.

A biometric security system records a physical trait, such as a voiceprint or a fingerprint. For example, your wallet PC might demand that you read aloud a random word that it flashes on its screen or that you press your thumb against the side of the device whenever you are about to conduct a transaction with significant financial implications. The wallet will compare what it “heard” or “felt” with its digital record of your voice- or thumbprint.

Wallet PCs with the proper equipment will be able to tell you exactly where you are anyplace on the face of Earth. The Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites in an orbit around Earth broadcast signals that permit jetliners, oceangoing boats, and cruise missiles, or hikers with handheld GPS receivers, to know their exact location to within a few hundred feet. Such devices are currently available for a few hundred dollars, and they will be built into many wallet PCs.

The wallet PC will connect you to the information highway while you travel a real highway, and tell you where you are. Its built-in speaker will be able to dictate directions to let you know that a freeway exit is coming up or that the next intersection has frequent accidents. It will monitor digital traffic reports and warn you that you’d better leave for an airport early, or suggest an alternate route. The wallet PC’s color maps will overlay your location with whatever kinds of information you desire—road and weather conditions, campgrounds, scenic spots, even fast-food outlets. You might ask, “Where’s the nearest Chinese restaurant that is still open?” and the information requested will be transmitted to the wallet by wireless network. Off the roads, on a hike in the woods, it will be your compass and as useful as your Swiss Army knife.

In fact, I think of the wallet PC as the new Swiss Army knife. I had one of those knives when I was a kid. Mine was neither the most basic with just two blades nor the one with a workshop’s worth of equipment. It had the classic shiny red handle with the white cross and lots of blades and attachments, including a screwdriver, a tiny pair of scissors, and even a corkscrew (although at the time I had no use for that particular accessory). Some wallet PCs will be simple and elegant and offer only the essentials, such as a small screen, a microphone, a secure way to transact business with digital money, and the capability to read or otherwise use basic information. Others will bristle with all kinds of gadgets, including cameras, scanners that will be able to read printed text or handwriting, and receivers with the global-positioning capability. Most will have a panic button for you to press if you need emergency help. Some models will include thermometers, barometers, altimeters, and heart-rate sensors.

Prices will vary accordingly, but generally wallet PCs will be priced about the way cameras are today. Simple, single-purpose “smart cards” for digital currency will cost about what a disposable camera does now, whereas, like an elaborate camera, a really sophisticated wallet PC might cost $1,000 or more, but it will outperform the most exotic computer of just a decade ago. Smart cards, the most basic form of the wallet PC, look like credit cards and are popular now in Europe. Their microprocessors are embedded within the plastic. The smart card of the future will identify its owner and store digital money, tickets, and medical information. It won’t have a screen, audio capabilities, or any of the more elaborate options of the more expensive wallet PCs. It will be handy for travel or as a backup, and may be sufficient by itself for some people’s uses.

If you aren’t carrying a wallet PC, you’ll still have access to the highway by using kiosks—some free, some requiring payment of a fee—which will be found in office buildings, shopping malls, and airports in much the same spirit as drinking fountains, rest rooms, and pay phones. In fact, they will replace not only pay phones but also banking machines, because they will offer their capabilities as well as all the other highway applications, from sending and receiving messages to scanning maps and buying tickets. Access to kiosks will be essential, and available everywhere. Some kiosks will display advertising links to specific services when you first log on—a bit like the phones in airports that connect right to hotel and rental-car reservations. Like the cash machines we find in airports today, they will look like rugged devices, but inside they will also be PCs.

No matter what form the PC takes, users will still have to be able to navigate their way through its applications. Think of the way you use your television remote control today to choose what you want to watch. Future systems with more choices will have to do better. They’ll have to avoid making you go step-by-step through all the options. Instead of having to remember which channel number to use to find a program, you will be shown a graphical menu and be able to select what you want by pointing to an easy-to-understand image.

You won’t necessarily have to point to make your point. Eventually we’ll also be able to speak to our televisions, personal computers, or other information appliances. At first we’ll have to keep to a limited vocabulary, but eventually our exchanges will become quite conversational. This capability requires powerful hardware and software, because conversation that a human can understand effortlessly is very hard for a computer to interpret. Already, voice recognition works fine for a small set of predefined commands, such as “Call my sister.” It’s much more difficult for a computer to decipher an arbitrary sentence, but in the next ten years this too will become possible.

Some users will find it convenient to handwrite instructions to a computer, rather than speaking or typing them. Many companies, including Microsoft, have spent some years working on what we call “pen-based computers” capable of reading handwriting. I was overly optimistic about how quickly we would be able to create software that would recognize the handwriting of a broad range of people. The difficulties turned out to be quite subtle. When we tested the system ourselves it worked well, but new users continued to have trouble with it. We discovered we were unconsciously making our handwriting neater and more recognizable than usual. We were adapting to the machine rather than the other way around. Another time, when the team thought they had created a program that worked, they came proudly to demonstrate their achievement to me. It didn’t work at the demonstration. Everyone on the project happened to be right-handed, and the computer, which was programmed to look at the strokes in the writing, couldn’t interpret the very different ones in my left-handed penmanship. It turned out that getting a computer to recognize handwriting is as difficult as getting one to recognize speech. But I remain optimistic that as computer performance increases we’ll have computers able to do this too.

Whether you give the command by voice, in writing, or by pointing, the selections you’re going to want to make will involve more complicated choices than just which movie to watch, and you’ll want to be able to make them easily. Users won’t stand for being confused or frustrated or for having their time wasted. The highway’s software platform will have to make it almost infallibly easy to find information, even if users don’t know what they’re looking for. There will be lots of information. The highway will have access to everything in hundreds of libraries and to all types of merchandise.

One of the worries most often expressed about the highway concerns “information overload.” It is usually voiced by someone who imagines, rather aptly, that the fiber-optic cables of the information highway will be like enormous pipes spewing out large quantities of information.

Information overload is not unique to the highway, and it needn’t be a problem. We already cope with astonishing amounts of information by relying on an extensive infrastructure that has evolved to help us be selective—everything from library catalogs to movie reviews to the Yellow Pages to recommendations from friends. When people worry about the information-overload problem, ask them to consider how they choose what to read. When we visit a bookstore or a library we don’t worry about reading every volume. We get by without reading everything because there are navigational aids that point to information of interest and help us find the print material we want. These pointers include the corner newsstand, the Dewey decimal system in libraries, and book reviews in the local newspaper.

On the information highway, technology and editorial services will combine to offer a number of ways to help us find information. The ideal navigation system will be powerful, expose seemingly limitless information, and yet remain very easy to use. Software will offer queries, filters, spatial navigation, hyperlinks, and agents as the primary selection techniques.

One way to understand the different selection methods is to think of them metaphorically. Imagine specific information—a collection of facts, a breaking news story, a list of movies—all placed in an imaginary warehouse. A query does a search through every item in the warehouse to see if it meets some criterion you have established. A filter is a check on everything new that comes into the warehouse to see if it matches that criterion. Spatial navigation is a way you can walk around inside the warehouse checking on inventory by location. Perhaps the most intriguing approach, and the one that promises to be the easiest of all to use, will be to enlist the aid of a personal agent who will represent you on the highway. The agent will actually be software, but it will have a personality you’ll be able to talk to in one form or another. This will be like delegating an assistant to look at the inventory for you.

Here’s how the different systems will work. A query, as its name indicates, is a question. You will be able to ask a wide range of questions and get complete answers. If you can’t recall the name of a movie but you remember that it starred Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and that there is a scene in which he’s asking a lot of questions and she’s shivering, then you could type in a query that asks for all movies that match:"Spencer Tracy,” “Katharine Hepburn,” “cold,” and “questions” In reply, a server on the highway would list the 1957 romantic comedy Desk Set, in which Tracy quizzes a shivering Hepburn on a rooftop terrace in the middle of winter. You could watch the scene, watch the whole film, read the script, examine reviews of the movie, and read any comments that Tracy or Hepburn might have made publicly about the scene. If a dubbed or subtitled print had been made for release outside English-speaking countries, you could watch the foreign versions. They might be stored on servers in various countries but would be instantly available to you.

The system will accommodate straightforward queries such as “Show me all the articles that ran worldwide about the first test-tube baby,” or “List all the stores that carry two or more kinds of dog food and will deliver a case within sixty minutes to my home address,” or “Which of my relatives have I been out of touch with for more than three months?” It will also be able to deliver answers to much more complex queries. You might ask, “Which major city has the greatest percentage of the people who watch rock videos and regularly read about international trade?” Generally, queries won’t require much response time, because most of the questions are likely to have been asked before and the answers will already have been computed and stored.

You’ll also be able to set up “filters,” which are really just standing queries. Filters will work around the clock, watching for new information that matches an interest of yours, filtering out everything else. You will be able to program a filter to gather information on your particular interests, such as news about local sports teams or particular scientific discoveries. If the most important thing to you is the weather, your filter will put that at the top of your personalized newspaper. Some filters will be created automatically by your computer, based on its information about your background and areas of interest. Such a filter might alert me to an important event regarding a person or institution from my past: “Meteorite crashes into Lakeside School.” You will also be able to create an explicit filter. That will be an on-going request for something particular, such as “Wanted: 1990 Nissan Maxima for parts” or “Tell me about anybody selling memorabilia from the last World Cup” or “Is anyone around here looking for someone to bicycle with on Sunday afternoons, rain or shine?” The filter will keep looking until you call off the search. If a filter finds a potential Sunday bicycling companion, for instance, it will automatically check on any other information the person might have published on the network. It will try to answer the question “What’s he like?"—which is the first question you’d be likely to ask about a potential new friend.

Spatial navigation will be modeled on the way we locate information today. When we want to find out about some subject now, it’s natural to go to a labeled section of a library or bookstore. Newspapers have sports, real estate, and business sections where people “go” for certain kinds of news. In most newspapers, weather reports appear in the same general location day after day.

Spatial navigation, which is already being used in some software products, will let you go where the information is by enabling you to interact with a visual model of a real or make-believe world. You can think of such a model as a map—an illustrated, three-dimensional table of contents. Spatial navigation will be particularly important for interacting with televisions and small, portable PCs, which are unlikely to have conventional keyboards. To do some banking, you might go to a drawing of a main street, then point, using a mouse or a remote control or even your finger, at the drawing of a bank. You will point to a courthouse to find out which cases are being heard by which judges or what the backlog is. You will point to the ferry terminal to learn the schedule and whether the boats are running on time. If you are considering visiting a hotel, you will be able to find out when rooms are available and look at a floor plan, and if the hotel has a video camera connected to the highway, you might be able to look at its lobby and restaurant and see how crowded it is at the moment.

You’ll be able to jump into the map so you can navigate down a street or through the rooms of a building. You’ll be able to zoom in and out and pan around to different locations very easily. Let’s say you want to buy a lawn mower. If the screen shows the inside of a house, you might move out the back door, where you might see landmarks, including a garage. A click on the garage will take you inside it, where you might see tools, including a lawn mower. A click on the lawn mower will take you to categories of relevant information, including advertisements, reviews, user manuals, and sales showrooms in cyberspace. It will be simple to do some quick comparison shopping, taking advantage of any amount of information you want. When you click on the picture of the garage and seem to move inside it, behind-the-scenes information relating to the objects “inside” the garage will be fed to your screen from servers spread over thousands of miles on the highway.

When you point at an object on the screen to bring up information about the object, you are employing a form of “hyperlinking.” Hyperlinks let users leap from informational place to informational place instantly, just as spaceships in science fiction jump from geographic place to geographic place through “hyperspace.” Hyperlinks on the information highway will let you find answers to your questions when they occur to you and you’re interested. Let’s say you’re watching the news and you see someone you don’t recognize walking with the British prime minister. You want to know who she is. Using your television’s remote control, you will point at the person. That action will bring up a biography and a list of other news accounts in which she figured recently. Point at something on the list, and you will be able to read it or watch it, jumping any number of times from topic to topic and gathering video, audio, and text information from all over the world.

Spatial navigation can also be used for touring. If you want to see reproductions of the artwork in a museum or gallery, you’ll be able to “walk” through a visual representation, navigating among the works much as if you were physically there. For details about a painting or sculpture, you would use a hyperlink. No crowds, no rush, and you could ask anything without worrying about seeming uninformed. You would bump into interesting things, just as you do in a real gallery. Navigating through a virtual gallery won’t be like walking through a real art gallery, but it will be a rewarding approximation—just as watching a ballet or basketball game on television can be entertaining even though you’re not in the theater or stadium.

If other people are visiting the same “museum,” you will be able to choose to see them and interact with them or not, as you please. Your visits needn’t be solitary experiences. Some locations will be used purely for cyberspace socialization; in others no one will be visible. Some will force you to appear to some degree as you are; others won’t. The way you look to other users will depend on your choices and the rules of the particular location.

If you are using spatial navigation, the place you’re moving around in won’t have to be real. You’ll be able to set up imaginary places and return to them whenever you want. In your own museum, you’ll be able to move walls, add imaginary galleries, and rearrange the art. You might want all still lifes to be displayed together, even if one is a fragment of a Pompeian fresco that hangs in a gallery of ancient Roman art and one is a Cubist Picasso from a twentieth-century gallery. You will be able to play curator and gather images of your favorite artworks from around the world to “hang” in a gallery of your own. Suppose you want to include a warmly remembered painting of a man asleep being nuzzled by a lion, but you can’t recall either the artist or where you saw it. The information highway won’t make you go looking for the information. You’ll be able to describe what you want by posing a query. The query will start your computer or other information appliance sifting through a reservoir of information to deliver those pieces that match your request.

You will even be able to give friends tours, whether they are sitting next to you or watching from the other side of the world. “Here, between the Raphael and the Modigliani,” you might say, “is a favorite finger painting I did when I was three years old.”

The last type of navigational aid, and in many ways the most useful of all, is an agent. This is a filter that has taken on a personality and seems to show initiative. An agent’s job is to assist you. In the Information Age, that means the agent is there to help you find information.

To understand the ways an agent can help with a variety of tasks, consider how it could improve today’s PC interface. The present state of the art in user interface is the graphical user interface, such as Apple’s Macintosh and Microsoft Windows, which depicts information and relationships on the screen instead of just describing them in text. Graphical interfaces also allow the user to point to and move objects including pictures—around on the screen.

But the graphical user interface isn’t easy enough for future systems. We’ve put so many options on the screen that programs or features that are not used regularly have become daunting. The features are great and fast for people familiar with the software, but for the average user not enough guidance comes from the machine for him or her to feel comfortable. Agents will remedy that.

Agents will know how to help you partly because the computer will remember your past activities. It will be able to find patterns of use that will help it work more effectively with you. Through the magic of software, information appliances connected to the highway will appear to learn from your interactions and will make suggestions to you. I call this “softer software.”

Software allows hardware to perform a number of functions, but once the program is written, it stays the same. Softer software will appear to get smarter as you use it. It will learn about your requirements in pretty much the same way a human assistant does and, like a human assistant, will become more helpful as it learns about you and your work. The first day a new assistant is on the job, you can’t simply ask him to format a document like another memo you wrote a few weeks ago. You can’t say, “Send a copy to everybody who should know about this.” But over the course of months and years, the assistant becomes more valuable as he picks up on what is typical routine and how you like things done.

The computer today is like a first-day assistant. It needs explicit first-day instructions all the time. And it remains a first-day assistant forever. It will never make one iota of adjustment as a response to its experience with you. We’re working to perfect softer software. No one should be stuck with an assistant, in this case software, that doesn’t learn from experience.

If an agent that could learn were available now, I would want it to take over certain functions for me. For instance, it would be very helpful if it could scan every project schedule, note the changes, and distinguish the ones I had to pay attention to from the ones I didn’t. It would learn the criteria for what needed my attention: the size of the project, what other projects are dependent on it, the cause and the length of any delay. It would learn when a two-week slip could be ignored, and when such a slip indicates real trouble and I’d better look into it right away before it gets worse. It will take time to achieve this goal, partly because it’s difficult, as with an assistant, to find the right balance between initiative and routine. We don’t want to overdo it. If the built-in agent tries to be too smart and anticipates and confidently performs unrequested or undesired services, it will be annoying to users who are accustomed to having explicit control over their computers.

When you use an agent, you will be in a dialogue with a program that behaves to some degree like a person. It could be that the software mimics the behavior of a celebrity or a cartoon character as it assists you. An agent that takes on a personality provides a “social user interface.” A number of companies, including Microsoft, are developing agents with social-user-interface capabilities. Agents won’t replace the graphical-user-interface software, but, rather, will supplement it by providing a character of your choosing to assist you. The character will disappear when you get to the parts of the product you know very well. But if you hesitate or ask for help, the agent will reappear and offer assistance. You may even come to think of the agent as a collaborator, built right into the software. It will remember what you’re good at and what you’ve done in the past, and try to anticipate problems and suggest solutions. It will bring anything unusual to your attention. If you work on something for a few minutes and then decide to discard the revision, the agent might ask if you’re sure you want to throw the work away. Some of today’s software already does that. But if you were to work for two hours and then give an instruction to delete what you’d just done, the social interface would recognize that as unusual and possibly a serious mistake on your part. The agent would say, “You’ve worked on this for two hours. Are you really, really sure you want to delete it?”

Some people, hearing about softer software and social interface, find the idea of a humanized computer creepy. But I believe even they will come to like it, once they have tried it. We humans tend to anthropomorphize. Animated movies take advantage of this tendency. The Lion King is not very realistic, nor does it try to be. Anybody could distinguish little Simba from a live lion cub on film. When a car breaks down or a computer crashes, we are apt to yell at it, or curse it, or even ask why it let us down. We know better, of course, but still tend to treat inanimate objects as if they were alive and had free will. Researchers at universities and software companies are exploring how to make computer interfaces more effective, using this human tendency. In programs such as Microsoft Bob, they have demonstrated that people will treat mechanical agents that have personalities with a surprising degree of deference. It has also been found that users’ reactions differed depending on whether the agent’s voice was female or male. Recently we worked on a project that involved users rating their experience with a computer. When we had the computer the users had worked with ask for an evaluation of its performance, the responses tended to be positive. But when we had a second computer ask the same people to evaluate their encounters with the first machine, the people were significantly more critical. Their reluctance to criticize the first computer “to its face” suggested that they didn’t want to hurt its feelings, even though they knew it was only a machine. Social interfaces may not be suitable for all users or all situations, but I think that we’ll see lots of them in the future because they “humanize” computers.

We have a fairly clear idea of what sorts of navigation we’ll have on the highway. It’s less clear what we’ll be navigating through, but we can make some good guesses. Many applications available on the highway will be purely for fun. Pleasures will be as simple as playing bridge or a board game with your best friends, even though you are all in several different cities. Televised sporting events will offer you the opportunity to choose the camera angles, the replays, and even the commentators for your version. You’ll be able to listen to any song, anytime, anywhere, piped in from the world’s largest record store: the information highway. Perhaps you’ll hum a little tune of your own invention into a microphone, and then play it back to hear what it could sound like if orchestrated or performed by a rock group. Or you’ll watch Gone With the Wind with your own face and voice replacing that of Vivien Leigh or Clark Gable. Or see yourself walking down the runway at a fashion show, wearing the latest Paris creations adjusted to fit your body or the one you wish you had.

Users with curiosity will be mesmerized by the abundance of information. Want to know how a mechanical clock works? You’ll peer inside one from any vantage point and be able to ask questions. Eventually you may even be able to crawl around inside a clock, using a virtual-reality application. Or you’ll be able to assume the role of a heart surgeon or play the drums at a sold-out rock concert, thanks to the information highway’s ability to deliver rich simulations to home computers. Some of the choices on the highway will be supersets of today’s software, but the graphics and animation will be far, far better.

Other applications will be strictly practical. For example, when you go on vacation a home-management application will be able to turn down the heat, notify the post office to hold your mail and the newspaper carrier not to deliver the printed paper, cycle your indoor lighting so that it appears you are home, and automatically pay routine bills.

Still other applications will be completely serious. My dad broke his finger badly one weekend and went to the nearest emergency room, which happened to be Children’s Hospital in Seattle. They refused to do anything for him because he was a few decades too old. Had there been an information highway at the time, it would have saved him some trouble by telling him not to bother trying that hospital. An application, communicating on the highway, would have told him which nearby emergency rooms were in the best position to help him at that particular time.

If my dad were to break another finger a few years from now, he not only would be able to use an information highway application to find an appropriate hospital, he might even be able to register electronically with the hospital while driving there and avoid conventional paperwork entirely. The hospital’s computer would match his injury to a suitable doctor, who would be able to retrieve my father’s medical records from a server on the information highway. If the doctor called for an X ray, it would be stored in digital form on a server, available for immediate review by any authorized doctor or specialist throughout the hospital or the world. Comments made by anyone reviewing the X ray, whether oral or in text form, would be linked to Dad’s medical records. Afterward my father would be able to look at the X rays from home and listen to the professional commentary. He could share the X rays with his family: “Look at the size of that fracture! Listen to what the doctor said about it!”

Most of these applications, from checking a pizza menu to sharing centralized medical records, are already starting to appear on PCs. Interactive information sharing is quickly moving closer to becoming a part of everyday life. However, before that happens, a lot of pieces of the highway still have to be put in place.