Dawn of the digital information era

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Nevertheless, for businesses the arrival of the desktop PCs built around relatively low cost standard components put real computing power into the hands of end-users for the first time. This meant Individual users could create, manipulate and control their own data and were freed from the constraints of dealing with a big IT department.

However, the limitations of desktop PCs as "islands of computing power" also quickly became apparent. In particular, people discovered they needed to hook their machines together with local area networks to share data and peripherals as well as exchange messages.

By the start of the 1990s, a new corporate computer architecture called client/server computing had emerged built around desktop PCs and more powerful servers linked together by a local area network.

Over the past few years, however, there has been growing disatisfaction, particularly among big corporate PC users, with the client/server model mainly because of its complexity and high cost of lifetime ownership.

As a result, there has been a pronounced swing back towards a centralised computing model in the past few years, accelerated by the growth of the internet.

The internet has its origins in the 1970s and work undertaken by
Vinton Cerf and otters to design systems that would enable research and academic institutions working on military projects to co-operate.

This led to the development of the Ethernet standard and TCP/ IP, the basic internet protocol. It also led Bob Metcalfe to promulgate
"Metcalfe's Law" which states the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes attached to it.

But arguably, it was not until the mid-1990s and the commercialisation of the Internet that the true value of internetworking became apparent. The growth of the internet and the world wide web in particular since then has been astonishing.

With the help of tools like web browsers, the internet was transformed in just four years from an arcane system linking mostly academic institutions into a global transport system with 50m users.
Today, that figure has swollen to about 160m and estimates for the electronic commerce that it enables are pushed up almost weekly.

According to the latest Gold-man Sachs internet report, the business-to-business e-commerce market alone will grow to Јl,500bn in
2004, up from $114bn this year and virtually nothing two years ago.

Two inter-related technologies have been driving these changes: semiconductors and network communications.

For more than 25 years, semiconductor development has broadly followed the dictum of "Moore's Law" laid down by Gordon Moore, co- founder of Intel.

This states that the capacity of semiconductor chips will double every 18 months, or expressed a different way, that the price of computing power will halve every 18 months.

Moore's Law is expected to hold true for at least another decade but around 20l2 scientists believe semiconductor designers will run into some physical (atomic) roadblocks as they continue to shrink the size of the components and lines etched onto of silicon chips.

At that stage, some computer scientists believe it will be necessary to look for alternatives to silicon-based computing.
Research into new materials and computer architectures is mostly focusing on the potential of quantum computing.

Meanwhile, the deadline keeps being pushed back by improvements to existing processes. At the same time, there have been big leaps in communications technologies and, in particular, fibre optics and IP- based systems.

Today, one strand of Qwest's US network can carry all North
America's telecoms traffic and in a few years, the same strand of glass fibre will be able to carry all the world's network traffic.

"We are going to have so much bandwidth, we are not going-to know what to do with it," says John Patrick vice president of internet technology at IBM.

"I am very optimistic about the future."

He believes this telecoms capacity will enable the creation of a wide range of internet-based new services including digital video and distributed storage and medical systems.

But he cautions: "The evolution of the internet is based upon technical things, but in the end it is not about technology itself, it is about what the technology can enable."

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