Communications of the ACM articles from February 1997

Communications of the ACM archives from February 1997

Technology in bloom: implications for the next 50 years.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... It has been a busy 50 years. Information technology (IT) has rushed from relays to tubes to transistors to ICs. We began processing numbers, and now process data types ranging from text to video to declarative rules. We went from personal...

Cyberspace 2000: dealing with information overload.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... Francis Bacon is reported to have said that the three things that made his world different from that of the ancient Greeks and Romans were the printing press, the compass and gunpowder. It is instructive to note he didn't mention the water...

The body electric.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... By 2047, one can imagine a body-networked, on-board assistant a guardian angel that can capture and retrieve everything we hear, read, and see. It could have as much memory and processing power as its master, that is 1,000 million-million...

Hardware, software, and infoware.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... For many years, computer science has been straining at the bounds of the computer, hoping for a language, a technique, a system that would transcend the rigid bounds of the purely procedural. All of those attempts have failed, to a greater or...

Education and jobs in the digital world.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... The digital world will support daily life in the 21st century; it will be the infrastructure underlying commerce and community. Yet the Net - by which I mean the entire modern information infrastructure based on digital technology - has no...

A time of transition. (information age)(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... You can tell that something unusual is going on these days by the way we draw our graphs. In normal times, we would use a linear scale to plot progress. The height of our graph would be proportional to the measure of progress. But we live at a...

Pervasive information systems.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... For many years, I have dreamed of the day when computers would become pervasive technology - that is, a technology more noticeable by its absence than its presence - in the same way cars, televisions, and telephones have become part of everyday...

Garage cinema and the future of media technology.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... Although we are living in the "computer age," the full implications of computational ideas have not been realized in our century. We are at the early apparatus phase of computational development - the profound ideas of computation have not yet...

How to surf the technology waves we created.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... Life used to be different and much simpler. Whether in school, as a career person, or in retirement, there were simple rules. As a computer neophyte in school, the prospects were clear. As a computer professional, the environment was surer. As...

The frontier between us.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... The easiest predictions to make about the next 50 years of computer science are those centering on the computers, not the people. For example, I can predict with a fair degree of confidence that there will be fabulous increases in hardware...

World-wide computer.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... It has always been the goal of humankind that machines should help people, but when it comes to the World-Wide Web, that help is often to provide a dumbwaiter service, shoveling information onto the computer screen faster and faster, allowing...

Between hope and fear.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... Hope is a vital human emotion, stimulated by the desire to make life better and infused with the belief that change is possible. Hope has a strong rational component that shapes plans and reasons about possible outcomes, but hope depends on...

Post-WIMP user interfaces. (windows, icons, menus and pointing device)(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... Unlike the steady, predictable hardware price/performance improvement described by Moore s law, there has been no such year-to-year progress in user interface design. Instead, the history of user interfaces can be characterized using...

The best of all possible worlds.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... One of the hazards of making a public spectacle of oneself is false labeling by the spectators. So, since I talk about the potential consequences of technology, I'm often accused of being a "futurist," even though I think predicting the future...

Better democracy through technology.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... Democracy, at its core, is about people. Or it should be. Somehow during the 20th century, that concept was lost in the translation. The power of democracy shifted, ever so slowly, residing with the elite in Washington, D.C. Some will argue...

The digital revolution in retrospect.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... After 50 years of the ACM, it's clear that computers have become history. We now live in the Information Age. This is a lovely situation, but it won't last. We're extremely good at transforming "ages" into mere history now. The Radio Age, the...

Asleep at the keyboard.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... I hope that during the next 50 years we will awaken to the challenges and risks of the intelligent machinery to which we increasingly defer. Just as, 50 years ago, only "eccentrics" worried about their contributions to the local landfill or the...

Directing policy-making beyond the Net's metaphor. (Internet)(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... "The internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation. The government may not through the CDA [Communications Decency Act] interrupt the conversation. As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the...

The right to read.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... (from "The Road To Tycho," a collection of articles about the antecedents of the Lunarian Revolution, published in Luna City in 2097) For Dan Halbert, the road to Tycho began in college - when Lissa Lenz asked to borrow his computer. Hers...

What will happen in the next 50 years?(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... When I was a child, I wondered why I had to stand in line so often. As I got older, I began to question I had to fill out the same information over and over again. These phenomena of waiting and repetition are ending now. Scenarios that include...

Crush and crash: logic of a terrible tomorrow.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... The future used to be silver, as someone has said. There would be silver rocketships and silver cities on the moon and silver robots in silver laboratories. Now we see the earth itself is the laboratory, and humans, not robots, are engaged...

Sensors: the next wave of innovation.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... The Infotech Revolution is 50 years young, yet despite all the innovation and surprises to date, it is quite clear that far greater change lies ahead. We marvel at how computers have insinuated themselves into every corner of our lives, knowing...

Looking for a humane interface: will computers ever become easy to use?(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... The year 1997 marks a half-century of electronic computing, but it also falls on a lot of decades and half-decades in the history of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction), personal computers, and even my own involvement in the field. Landmarks in...

The past and future history of the Internet.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... The Internet has revolutionized the computer and communications world like nothing before. The telegraph, telephone, radio, and computer have all set the stage for the Internet's unprecedented integration of capabilities. The Internet is at...

Look in the spaces of tomorrow's innovations.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... If you want to know where the future of computing and communications is going, I suggest you first "look at the spaces." I'll explain what I mean by that, but first, recall the (in)famous predictions we find it easy to chuckle about today,...

The microprocessor: engine of the technology revolution.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... It is humbling to try to predict the future in the fast-moving computer industry. Things change so fast, no simple extrapolation of the present is likely to resemble the future in any important way. The impact of the microprocessor is even more...

Globalizing business, education, culture through the Internet.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... The world became a smaller place in the 20th century. Transportation technology caused physical distances to shrink by several orders of magnitude, and telecommunications technology made terrestrial distances insignificant. The transformation...

My computer-related wish list for the next 50 years.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... The IBM Almaden Research Center, a beautifully appointed cluster of buildings perched on a hillside overlooking hundreds of bucolic acres in the coastal mountains near San Jose, is one location that strongly influences future developments in....

Spinning the webs into the 21st century.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... Who better to design a school Web site than a team of 17-year-old high school students? Members of the executive committee of the Sachem Web Slingers discuss their hopes for the future in the context of their experiences as early adopters of...

Software engineering: stretching the limits of complexity.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... Trying to predict the future of our field is risky: Our technology is changing so fast that the information necessary to make good predictions is simply not available. Instead, I thought I would look at the past and current state of software...

A new social contract for research. (The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... Wilhelm Von Humboldt, founder of the University of Berlin in 1809, did the most to spread the notion that universities are places of research [4]. Their sole job had been to give students a broad education and to prepare them for careers in...

Communications technology and its impact by 2010.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... Predicting the state of such a rapidly developing field such as communications technology over a 14-year period is a prescription for erroneous calls, but in the interest of generating controversy and thought, I will have a try. Before I...

Database research faces the information explosion.(The Next 50 Years: Our Hopes, Our Visions, Our Plans)
February 1, 1997... Accounts of the "Information Explosion" are routinely published in the popular news media. This term, though imprecise, refers not only to the increasing amount of information available in digital form, but to the phenomenal growth in the...

Hopes for fewer risks?
February 1, 1997... This month we take a look into the future and identify some needs and expectations based on what we have learned in the past. (For example, recall the trends discussed in December 1995.) We have previously examined the potentially constructive...