4 Applications and appliances
When I was a kid, The Ed Sullivan Showaired 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 Showthree 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 Seinfeldat 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.
