Editorial: February 1, 1996

Today’s topic is the Internet, but first a bit of history. Physicists Arthur Schawlow and Charles Hard Townes described the laser in their 1958 patent application. Theodore Maiman, another physicist, fired up the first working laser (solid ruby) in 1960. Lasers were hot stuff back in the early 1960s, but they were solutions looking for problems. Excited by the promise of laser technology, I presented a talk on lasers and masers when I attended elementary school. Someone asked me what they’d be good for. Communications was about all I could answer. We just didn’t know what we’d do with the new toy 35 years ago.

Now we take the ubiquitous laser for granted. You find them in many industrial and medical applications such as soldering, cloth cutting, eye surgery, and artery repair. Every CD player contains a semiconductor laser.

Microcomputers appeared about 1975. These boxes were based on Intel’s 1971 invention, the µP. Back then, people bought microcomputers just because they wanted a computer. Many buyers weren’t sure what they wanted these new toys to do, but they sure were neat! Numerous microcomputer companies blossomed and then disappeared: MITS, Imsai, Polymorphic Systems, Processor Technology, NorthStar (originally Kentucky Fried Computers), Vector Graphics, and Sphere, to name but a few.

Twenty years later, we all know what microcomputers, now called PCs, can do. They, too, are ubiquitous. We use PCs for word processing, financial calculations, process control, entertainment, and often to control lasers. Back in 1975, few could foresee how incredibly large the microcomputer’s sphere of influence would become.

Which brings us to the Internet. As it stands today, the Internet is a loose-knit fabric of analog and digital communications systems used to send a wide variety of digital data from here to there. It’s limited in bandwidth and reach; you can’t go everywhere on the Internet, and you can’t go to many places quickly. We know many of the things we’d like the Internet to do: carry stored and live video, provide real-time telepresence, and allow seamless collaboration between people separated by an office partition or an ocean. Some of these things the Internet can do today. Some it cannot. But it will. And it will do many other things we have yet to imagine. History proves it.

Steven H. Leibson
Editor in Chief