Chapter 1 - The Future

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The Future	47

instantly from the Internet by millions of people around the world, at any time they wish. That means the more complex software programs, which tend to overload home computers, can be stored at one central point, and Internet users can plug into any program they want. The process makes a home computer almost as easy to use as a TV set. Prime time becomes any time - but you run the programs.
  Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web, says the new "information appliance" might even come inside a cereal box. "My kids could rummage around for the free gift," he says, "take out a tube, unroll it to something flat, flexible and magnetic, stick it to the refrigerator and start navigating the Web."14
  Says Business Week: "The great information-appliance race is on. The goal: to create electronic gadgets that are as simple as the TV but can instantly make the connection to the digital world."
  Tie those concepts in with hire-purchase selling and you'll probably have the next big breakthrough in consumer electronics - with tremendous potential for education and learning. When a telephone, electricity or cable company can offer you instant access to the Internet and World Wide Web through a fiber-optic phone line and a combined TV-personal computer - and give you a payment choice of, say, $300 in cash or no deposit and $1.50 a week on your bill - every home will have cheap access to everyone else.
   Wired magazine's executive editor Kevin Kelly calls the new economy a "tectonic upheaval". And he writes: "The irony of our times is that the era of computers is over. All the major consequences of stand-alone computers have already taken place. All the most promising technologies making their debut now are chiefly due to communication between computers - that is, connections rather than computations." 15
  Kelly says the network economy is "fed by the resonance of two stellar bangs: the collapsing microcosm of chips and the exploding telecosm of connections. These sudden shifts are tearing the old laws of wealth apart and preparing territory for the emerging economy.
   "As the size of silicon chips shrinks to the microscopic, their costs shrink to the microscopic as well. They become cheap and tiny enough to slip into every - and the key word here is every - object we make."
  While the total world population of personal computers is expected to reach 500 million by 2002, "the number of noncomputer chips now

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