Offside Undo.(Brief Article)

Tom Mandel would have enjoyed AutoWeek's live web-cast. He would have enjoyed it and understood it-long before anyone knew what a webcast was.

Tom, a brilliant man who crafted his own degree from the University of Hawaii in ``futurism,'' worked for SRI when it was known as the Stanford Research Institute. Essentially, he gazed into crystal balls for corporations to let them know what life would be like 10, 20, 50 years hence and that, presumably, allowed multinationals to profit further from this foresight.

While at SRI in the 1970s, Tom studied the future of paper. You might recall that was a time when we had a newsprint shortage. The corporate question was whether that would always be the case. No, Tom concluded, paper would not go away. We would always have newspapers and books and magazines (hallelujah). Still, technology would allow us to have wonderful devices-he called them ``electronic clipboards''-that could store data and let us watch movies or read books electronically. Yes, Tom foretold the laptop.

Tom talked about the Web and about how he was part of an online community called The Well. To the analog world, he spouted techno-gibberish. Of course, he was way ahead of the curve.

Move forward more than a quarter- century, to Palm Springs, California. In the morning I pilot Buick's cross-over SUV, the Rendezvous, for more than 175 miles. I am ...