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The Evolution of Information
Technologies
JOHN S. MAYO
THE INTERACTION OF TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY
Humans were given capable and inquisitive minds, so they endlessly
seek better ways of doing things. This dnve, coupled with an innate
curiosity and a strong drive to unlock the secrets of nature, has created
a steady stream of technical innovations over the ages.
These innovative efforts have focused on the means for survival,
comfort, and accumulation of wealtl~with the hierarchy of needs
extending from physical basics of existence to higher-level wants
associated with self-actualization. A principal thrust of innovation
today continues toward technological advances that enhance the
productivity of labor and free humans of tasks done more economically
by machines. An insatiable appetite for convenience, comfort, and
entertainment products and services, as well as for means to overcome
natural barriers like geography and travel time, creates a constant pull
on technology. The pull is especially strong in areas relating to the
quality of life, and there have been many technical innovations to meet
that need. But the opportunities are far from exhausted.
Among society's newest demands on technology is for the means
to handle the vast amount of information generated by modern life.
This information explosion stems from sophisticated business practices,
new residential services, substantially increased record keeping through
extensive data bases, and the globalization of our advanced society.
The information technologies have evolved over many years to
assist a growing portion of the work force devoted to the generation,
7
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8
JOHN S. AlAYO
processing, transmission, storage, retrieval, and general use of infor-
mation. Bureaucracies generated dunug the major wars and the rapid
growth of social services in recent decades have helped increase the
number of infonnation workers in the U.S. work force, producing a
permanent change in our way of life. Stimulated by these and other
spurts of rapid growth, the percentage of information workers in the
U.S. work force has grown from about 10 percent in 1900 to about 30
percent in 1940 to about 50 percent in 1970. Since 1970 the fraction
has held at roughly 50 percent, probably as a result of the new
electronic infonnation technologies that augment human efforts. The
computer, along with telecommunications, is making today's infor-
mation work force more efficient, much as the engine raised produc-
tivity during the industrial revolution. In both cases, society's thirst
for technology to reduce labor was met in striking ways by a wide
range of innovations of varying impacts.
This thirst for technology creates a steady pull on innovation. In
addition, the technologies themselves provide a push. From the families
of all technologically feasible innovations of all time has come an
almost endless reservoir of potential technology. However, between
society's pull and the push of technology are two powerful gates, as
shown in Figure 1. The technology available to society at any particular
time is only that which can flow past the technology gate, which is
Social TechnOlO9y
_ Gate Gate _
Pull of society - \ mush of technology
· Survival \ ~ _ | ·AII feasible innovations
Comfort 1. . _ | ·Limits of technology
· Quality of life / ~ _ \
· Complexity many ~ \`
· t
· Economics · R&D prowess
· Common good · R&D management
· Public receptivity · Embedded base
· Regulation and legislation · Natural sequencing
· Standards
FIGURE 1 The flow of innovations into society.
SOURCE: AT&T Bell Laboratones.
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THE EVOLUTION OF INFO~ATION TECHNOLOGIES
9
operated by a series of strong forces. Among them are R&D prowess'
characteristics of the embedded technology base, natural sequencing
constraints, and perceived standards limitations:
.
The force of R&D prowess is the sum of all the contributions of individual
laboratones. The prowess of an R&D laboratory is limited by the skills of
its scientists and engineers and by the capabilities of its support environ-
ment, including both financial and physical resources. Laboratory prowess
also clearly depends on the wisdom and judgment of the R&D management
team.
The embedded base of technology, such as existing systems or production
facilities that represent a large investment, impacts the characteristics of
the R&D laboratories and the factories that make their products. It often
leads the R&D laboratories to seek innovations that have Meat synergy
with the embedded base, which can be either a curse or a blessing. On
the one hand, this force can limit the introduction of new technology as
well as discourage breakthroughs in totally new directions. On the other
hand, it brings focus and resources. With good systems engineering, older
technologies can be phased out, current ones upgraded, and entirely new
ones introduced, all in ways that are synergistic with the embedded base.
Natural sequencing simply means that the invention of the integrated
circuit, for example, would have been unlikely before the invention and
development of the transistor.
The imposition of standards prior to innovation can narrow the technology
gate by forcing R&D laboratories to focus on innovations that meet
preconceived standards, but which may in the long Ban not be the best
innovations at all.
Innovations that pass the technology gate must also pass the social
gate. The forces that operate the social gate include economics, the
common good, public receptivity, and regulation and legislation:
.
.
The economic force depends not only on the marketplace, but also on the
national economic structure. Currently, we see a significant difference in
the way economic forces affect innovation in the United States as compared
to Japan.
· Closely related to economics, but not always in concert with it, is the
force that makes technology serve the common good. Society will even-
tually, for the most part, either ignore or legislate against technology that
does not serve the common good.
The issue of public receptivity is related to that of the common good. In
the United States, the public defeated the supersonic transport and appears
to have nuclear power on its deathbed; however, it still remains to be
seen whether such innovations do not indeed serve the common good.
· Regulation and legislation have been and remain powerful forces at the
social gate forces very active in throttling technology on behalf of society.
OCR for page 10
10
.
JOHJ!; S. AtA YO
Much social good has come from such actions, but not without frequent
adverse impact in the long run.
The forces operating at the social gate are extremely powerful in
selecting the innovations that actually succeed. They serve as a
"tollgate" in the gap between the push of technology and the pull of
society. The Bating forces will be further examined, following the
discussion of the information technologies pushing at the gate.
Technologies that survive both gates have primarily three types of
impacts in the society they enter, depending heavily upon their
character. First, of greatest impact are the "killer" technologies such
as the engine, which replaced the horse, and the transistor, which
replaced the vacuum tube. Their impact, of course, extends far beyond
these major replacements, to opening whole new fields of opportunity.
Included among these are opportunities to satisfy previously unknown
or unrecognized societal needs and wants, often of an increasingly
sophisticated nature.
Second in impact are the "new domain" technologies. Although
they do not replace earlier technologies, they do open up entirely new
areas of opportunity. An example of the new domain technologies is
automatic speech recognition and synthesis, a rapidly developing
technology that win eventually allow inanimate objects such as cars
and appliances to speak and listen much as humans do.
Third, there are the "niche" technologies, which play a very
important role in meeting society's needs. When they first appear,
however, they are often mistaken for killer technologies. For example,
when broadcast television became feasible, many expected it to kill
newspapers, radio, and movies. Instead, it found its own niche and
satisfied a thirst in society not previously meter perhaps even
recognized.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES AND THEIR LIMITS
The growth in information jobs cited above is but one major indicator
of the rapid transition of our society to an information base. Another
major indicator is the rapid growth in information technologies. George
Stibitz's invention of the first digital computer, the achievement of
universal telephone service, and the invention of solid-state electronics
paved the way to the Information Age. The technology of the Infor-
mation Age is digital. The information is represented as digits, which
are generated, processed, transported, stored, recovered, and displayed
in order to do useful things for humans. The key technologies for
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THE EVOLUTION OF INFORMATION TECH!IOLOGIES
11
manipulating digits are integrated circuits, computing technology,
software, and photon~cs, as discussed below.
Integrated Circuits
The most powerful force of technology today is the expanding
capabilities of silicon integrated circuits. A tiny chip of silicon can
contain an electronic circuit consisting of hundreds of thousands of
transistors and all the necessary interconnecting conductors—and its
cost is only a few dollars. The circuitry on that chip is equivalent to
about 10 years of work by a person soldering discrete components
onto printed wiring boards. It is this tremendous unprovement in the
economics of circuit assembly, coupled with similar improvements in
the reliability of individual circuit functions, that accounts for the
power of this technology.
A common measure of progress in integrated circuit technology is
the number of components that can be squeezed into a single-chip
circuit. Figure 2 shows the exponential growth in components per chip
over the past two decades, and a projection for the next decade. The
number of components per chip of silicon is still increasing by a factor
of 100 per decade. Today the limit is almost 1 million components on
a chip; by 1990, it will be at least 5 million; and by the year 2000,
between 10 and 100 million.
109
108
O7
COMPONENTS
PER CHIP
1o6
105
104
103
1o2
10
YEAR
PHYSICAL LIMIT
X100 PER DECADE_
X1000 PER DECADE
~ 1 1
1960 1970
1980 1990
FIGURE 2 Changes in component density for silicon production, 1960 to 1990.
SOURCE: AT&T Bell Laboratones.
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12
JOHNS. MAYO
The limits of integrated circuit technology as we know it today are
determined basically by how big we can make a chip and how small
we can make the line widths used to define a working transistor. These
limits can easily be estimated by assuming the largest practical chip
to be about 1,000 square millimeters, and the smallest transistor to be
fabricated using O.1-micrometer (am) line widths (a length of about
400 silicon atoms). When reasonable space for electrical isolation and
interconnections is allowed, the resulting limit is easily derived to be
about 100 million components per chip. For such a chip, using known
technology, electrical isolation and interconnections would consume
approximately 90 percent of the chip area.
The magic of the ever-expanding capabilities of integrated circuits
will therefore be with us for at least another decade. Component
reliability will continue to increase dramatically, and integrated circuit
chips will perform more and more functions, ever faster and cheaper.
This progress will make possible increasingly powerful, reliable, lower-
cost digital systems and much more flexible approaches to systems
design. Integrated circuit progress is making it possible to have digital
systems everywhere, be they for computing, robotic control, office
automation, or telecommunications. Clearly, this force will continue
to be a major spur to further progress in the information technologies.
Computing Technology
Computing technology is a major beneficiary of the power of
integrated circuits. Figure 3 shows the past trends in computer
processing power and forecasts the future. Processing power is ex-
pressed in millions of instructions per second (MIPS), and each data
point in the figure represents a specific computer introduced into the
marketplace. Most notable is the rapid progress in processing power
of the single-chip computer or microcomputer, which has been doubling
each year. Extrapolation of the trend of the last decade forecasts that
microcomputers will have processing power comparable to that of
minicomputers and large, general-puIpose mainframe computers (max-
icomputers) by the early l990s. Because the computer is the "engine"
of the Information Age, having the power of today's largest computers
on a chip or even a few chips of silicon to go in automobiles, appliances,
toys, offices, factories, and homes is a tremendous driving force.
The trend curve of components per chip in Figure 2 showed that by
1990 integrated circuits will be within a factor of 10 of the physical
limit of the technology known today. That implies the maxicomputers,
minicomputers, and single-chip microcomputers as we now know them
OCR for page 13
THE EVOLUTION OF INFORAlAT10N TECHNOLOGIES
10 2
10
PROCESSING
POWER
(IVIIPS) 1O-1
lo-2
1 1
· IVIAXIS
· MINIS
· MICROS
1970
1980
YEAR
FIGURE 3 Trends in processing power of computers, 1970 to 1990.
SOURCE: AT&T Bell Laboratones.
13
1990
have an ultimate limit of a few lOs of MIPS. However, the limit of
chip processing power is not a limit to the processing power of
computing. For computing is rapidly moving toward new architectures
involving multiplicities of processing elements such as single-chip
computers. Multiplicities of such chips, however, are inherently more
expensive—largely because of the high costs and difficulty of inter-
connecting and programming them to function as single systems. For
automobiles, appliances, tools, home computers, and the like, we can
assume that most will operate with an ultimate computing power of
the order of 10 MIPS or less per computer. But an automobile, for
example, may eventually have a dozen or more computers.
Software
Software is vital not only to the operation of Information Age
systems, but also to their interlinking with each other, with data bases,
and with people. The demands for software are growing explosively
for tailoring systems to customers' needs, for making them reliable,
and for making them easier to use, or "friendlier.'' These demands,
in turn, are leading to increasingly complex software, ironically, to
achieve user simplicity.
Unfortunately, software is the "bottleneck" information technology.
Currently, it is generated principally by people, and most enterprises
generate more software by hiring more people a very difficult and
costly approach. It still takes a programmer approximately one year
to produce a few thousand lines of code. In telecommunications, a
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14
JOHN S. MAYO
large electronic toll switching machine uses more than 2 million lines,
a local electronic switcher more than 1 million lines, and System 85,
a Private Branch Exchange (PBX), almost 2 million lines. Industry
has reamed in the last few years how to manage big software systems,
developing them to meet cost, time, and performance objectives. But
it desperately needs an improvement in programming productivity to
sustain both the growth in complexity and the increasing demand for
software systems.
The rate of progress in improving programming productivity remains
extremely low. Figure 4 compares AT&T Bell Laboratones' produc-
tivity growth for producing software with that for design of silicon
integrated circuit chips and circuit packs. The bad news is common
throughout the industry. Software productivity is improving very
slowly. The good news is the increasing productivity of the electronics
designers, and that is largely a software success story. In fact, without
computer-aided design, much of the progress in todays most important
technology would be impossibl~and tomo~Tow's tasks, hopeless.
Even though chip complexity has increased 100-fold over the past
decade, computer-automated tools permitted us to use the same design
effort, as well as to significantly improve our ability to get error-free
chip designs.
There will eventually be dramatic improvements in programming
productivity. They will come from continued improvements in com-
puter aids for software design, leading eventually to automatic gen-
7
PRODUCTIVITY
RELATIVE
TO
1975
4
3
64~Icol::
5 ~ ~ ~: UIT PACKS
24~0FTWARE ~3
'75 '76 '77 '78 '79 '80 '8 1 '82 '83 '84
YEAR OF DESIGN START
FIGURE 4 Hardware and software productivity, 1975 to 1984.
SOURCE: AT&T Bell Laboratones.
OCR for page 15
THE EVOLUTION OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES
15
crayon of applications programs. Such a breakthrough in software
productivity will first require development of durable and detailed
technical standards, new methodologies for requirements generation,
and large software design programs for structuring, generating, and
testing code. Progress may first come through greater development of
reusable software components with standardized interfaces. Even those
standards do not exist and will be difficult to achieve. Early circuit
designers rapidly solved that problem for hardware components.
Clearly, it can also be done for software components.
There is an argument, based on the analogy of motors, that today's
software problems are transitory. When motors were new, users
"hooked them up" to genders, saws, and numerous other elements
to create functional tools. But as that technology matured, users' needs
were met by functioning systems that contained motors~rills, grind-
ers, saws, washing machines, dishwashers, cars, toothbrushes, toys—
an endless list. The analogy suggests that sooner or later a wide
spectrum of software systems will be available so that most users will
be able to buy functional Information Age products that perform the
needed tasks. These products will just happen to contain software—
much as dishwashers and refrigerators, for example, just happen to
contain motors. The user could not care less, so long as the dishes
are clean and the food cold. Such functional software-based products
are rapidly emerging in the marketplace, but the trend has just begun.
Photonics
Photonics is the key Information Age technology for transmitting
large amounts of digital information. There are two key innovations:
the laser and ultrapure glass fiber. Combined, they provide a trans-
mission capability that far exceeds that of copper wire and radio to
meet the most stringent needs of the Information Age.
Photon~cs technology has progressed rapidly. In about a decade the
technology has achieved some difficult technical milestones:
· Developing high-purity, ultratransparent, and high-strength glass fibers;
Constructing long-life lasers that can operate at room temperature and at
the appropriate wavelengths;
Optimizing the mode of lightwave propagation in the fiber and shifting
from multimode to single-mode fibers for many applications;
- Determining and exploiting the unique wavelengths at which fiber trans-
mission losses are the lowest;
· Developing means for wavelength multiplexing of multiple bit streams
onto the same fiber; and
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16
JOHNS. MAYO
· Developing single-frequency light sources which desensitize system per-
formance to wavelength dispersion in the fiber.
Where is innovation in photonics leading lightwave systems? The
current technical frontier is in increasing bit rates. The basic trend
continues toward higher communications capacity per fiber and greater
distances between signal amplifiers or repeaters. For example, since
AT&T introduced the first full-service commercial lightwave system
in 1977, fiber capacity has increased almost 10-fold, from 672 calls per
fiber to 6,048. The corresponding amplifier spacings have increased
from about 8 kilometers to more than 30 kilometers. In laboratory
experiments described recently, AT&T Bell Laboratones set a "dis-
tance record" by transmitting 420 million bits per second over 125
miles without amplification. Also, 2 billion bits per second were
transmitted over 80 miles using no amplification. That pulse rate can
transmit the entire 30-volume Encyclopaedia Britannica in a few
seconds. Underlying these accomplishments is healthy progress not
only in glass fibers and lasers, but also in photodetectors and many
other system components.
The limit of loss in today's fibers is shown in Figure 5. The two
wavelength bands at which the loss of practical fibers is both low and
near the limit are in the regions around 1.3 and 1.5 ,um. Most new
designs operate in these bands. Actual signal losses achieved in these
bands are close enough to the theoretical losses that major resew
breakthroughs in silicon fiber performance do not seem likely. On the
other hand, advances in materials processing could lead to entirely
new materials systems for fibers. Also, the power output of lasers will
rise, and the sensitivity of signal detection subsystems will improve.
So getting from today's capability of 125 miles without amplifiers to a
few thousand miles without amplifiers may yet be feasible. The
difference is not spectacular for domestic communications. But the
capability of sending signals a few thousand miles without amplifiers
is significant in globalizing the Information Age, for it would enable
us to span the oceans with passive lightwave systems.
What is the limit of lightwave technology as we know it today, and
when win we reach that limit? Extrapolation of progress in the rate at
which information can be sent through fibers and the distance it can
travel without amplification, coupled with a little analysis, suggests
the answers. Figure 6 shows that the product of rate in megabits per
second (MBPS) and distance in kilometers (km) has been doubling
yearly and this will probably continue for the rest of the decade, at
least. Each data point in the figure represents the leading edge
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THE EVOLUTION OF INFORAIATION TECHNOLOGIES
8.0
6.0
4.0
2.0
1.0
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0.1
17
LOSS (dB/km)
' ° ° r
MAXIMUM REPEATER
SPACING {MILES)
_ ~~
-
~ _
THEORETICAL '
l 1 1 -
0.8 0.9 1.0
1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6
WAVELENGTH {,wm}
FIGURE 5 Lightwave communications technology.
source: AT&T Bell Laboratones.
12
25
75
125
accomplishment for a single wavelength channel—continually domi-
nated by AT&T and the Japanese.
Simple detection theory can be used to estimate the physical limit
of today's lightwave technology. The estimate involves combining the
theoretical loss and nonlinear behavior of glass fiber with an assumed
maximum allowable laser power of approximately 1 watt and a minimum
requirement of about 10 to 100 photons per pulse. This forecast
suggests that the technology limits will permit the development of
lightwave systems with each channel operating 10 to 100 times faster
than today's best. Wavelength multiplexing will extend this limit by
another factor of 10 to 100, giving an ultimate limit of about 109, or 1
billion, MBPS/km.
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TlIE EVOLUTION OF INFO~ATION TECHNOLOGIES
23
Laser Materials Systems and Yields
The materials systems for lasers are in a relatively primitive state
today, resulting in rather low manufacturing yields. Improved materials
systems and structures would greatly lower the cost of lasers and, in
turn, accelerate the pace of advancement of lightwave technologies.
Because molecular beam epitaxy permits control of materials down to
the atomic levels, it offers exciting and expanding opportunities to
custom-fabr~cate new materials that may lead to new device concepts,
including lasers.
TECHNOLOGY SELECTION AND THE PACE OF INNOVATION
Now that we have a view of the key technologies, their limits, and
potential new technologies, let us further examine the gating forces
that determine how the winning technologies will be selected and the
resulting pace of innovation.
Marketplace Economics
The dominant force pulling innovations through the technology and
social gates today is the needs of the marketplace. For decades
electronic technologies have been pulled into the marketplace as fast
as humanly possible. Today's technology, however, is so rich that it
can do more things than society might find useful. Increasingly,
marketing resources are required to sort out innovations and potential
innovations, to contain the scope of development, and to focus
investment on the applications that will win in the marketplace. This
growing force of marketing in the information technology arena is
creating new and challenging relationships. Such a give-and-take
relationship between marketers and technologists has long operated in
low-technology fields such as soaps and toothpaste. Today, there is a
similar, rapidly evolving relationship in fields of highest technology,
especially in computers, software, and telecommunications.
The pull of the marketplace rests largely on willingness to pay. To
impact society significantly, an innovation must be of sufficient intrinsic
value that users will not only pay the traditional manufacturing, sales,
and related costs, but compensate for the high cost of development as
well. Information Age products are very it&D-intensive. For example,
R&D accounts for most of the cost of software, and the viability of
software in the marketplace more strongly depends on sales volumes
and copyright protection than do traditional manufactured products.
Technology selection is strongly tied to cost trends. For example,
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24
JOHN S. MAYO
the proliferation of digital systems ties directly to the falling cost of a
digital logic circuit, as shown by the curve in Figure 8. With each
passing year, new digital systems become economically feasible be-
cause their costs drop below what the user is willing to pay. The figure
also shows that at 1 dollar per logic gate, the telecommunications
industry could economically justify two digital systems: one called T1,
for voice transmission on wire pairs, and a digital controller for the
lESS local electronic switch. At 10 cents per logic gate, the 4ESS
electronic switch, a large digital toll machine, and the Dimensions
Private Branch Exchange became feasible. At 1 cent per logic gate,
5ESS Infonnation Age local digital switches became feasible, along
with a wide variety of microprocessor-based "intelligent" telephones
and terminals. Digital logic costs are now in the range of a tenth of a
cent per gate and will be on the order of a millicent per gate by 1990.
Each year as these logic costs continue to fall, the costs of a wide
range of new Information Age products will drop below the threshold
of user willingness to pay. The result is a mushrooming family of
intelligent products- and the mushrooming phenomenon is not likely
to slow down before the year 2000. The resulting economic climate
will create a wide range of innovations, and economic forces will sort
out the winners.
A user's willingness to pay is not an absolute. So technology selection
is strongly affected by public opinion and advertising. The case of
10
1
DOLLA RS . 1
PER
CIRCUIT .0 1
.000 1 _
.00 1
.0000 1
T 1 DIGITAL
\ TRANSMISSION
-
l 1, 1 1 1 1 1 1
4ESS
DIGITAL
TOLL SWITCH
\
1 ESS \ SESS
ELECTRONIC ~ hi' I DIGITAL
LOCAL SWITCH \LOCAL SWITCH
DIMENSION \ ,
PBX \
\
1950 1960 1970 1980 1 990
FIGURE 8 Distal integrated circuit costs, 1950 to 1990.
SOURCE: AT&T Bell ~bo~tones.
/
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THE EVOLUTION OF INFORAlATION TECHI!iOLOGIES
A_
videotape recorders versus the videodisk is an interesting example,
even though they are not functionally equivalent. It seems that society
has selected the videotape machine as the winning technology, possibly
because of its recording capability. The totality of forces that produced
that selection is very difficult to characterize, but I suggest that the
technologist needs help if he or she expects to forecast the technology
selection process.
R&D Economics
The force of economics is somewhat stronger at the social gate than
it is at the technology gate, but even so it is a powerful force behind
our R&D laboratories and even our university research centers. For
at their limits the key technologies are extremely expensive to develop.
The pace of innovation and, to a lesser extent, the direction of
innovation are increasingly controlled by R&D economics. Clean
rooms, feature patterning equipment, electron beam machines, and
the like are terribly expensive at the micrometer level of capability
and will become even more expensive as we move to submicrometer
geometries. Small companies and universities are increasingly becom-
ing followers rather than leaders. Today most universities cannot afford
the requisite equipment, and even the wealthier ones are having to
form special alliances with industry to raise the needed capital. The
situation will ease somewhat as more universities find that complete
fabrication facilities axe not essential for strong teaching programs or
even specialized research. But the trend is still there: the leading edge
R&D that produces the significant innovations that guide all of industry
can be afforded by only a few institutions in our society.
Government of course plays a large role in R&D economics. Of
particular importance are the general economic climate of the nation,
tax incentives, antitrust relief, and sharing of the output of the federal
laboratories, as well as technology initiatives in the Department of
Defense and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Each
of these forces is managed on its own, but the sum of all the forces is
not managed to speed the pace of technology and optimize the nation's
technical position.
R&D Prowess
The prowess of our industrial, government, and university R&D
laboratories remains a major factor in technology selection and the
pace of innovation. Competence and motivation of individual scientists
OCR for page 26
26
JOHN S. MAYO
and engineers are vital to R&D prowess, but management of those
laboratories also is very important. A prerequisite for innovation in a
particular area is the dedication of people and capital resources to that
area, and creation of an atmosphere conducive to innovation. AT&T
Bell Laboratories is widely acknowledged for having the winning
combination, as well as for creating most of the innovations for the
Information Age. Their inventions including solid-state devices, la-
sers, and a wide range of telecommunications and information tech-
nology spawned new industries that have gained significant innovative
strength of their own.
The power of these innovations to meet social needs is so great that
they have forced change in some of society's major institutions. By
opening up vast new frontiers of business opportunity and spawning
numerous competitors, solid-state technology blended telecommuni-
cations and data processing and led to the restructuring of those
industries, just as the engine forced restructuring in the industrial
revolution. Industry structure, in turn, is a strong force in technology
selection and in pacing innovation.
We are dealing with extremely powerful technologies whose forces
are at best barely under our control. Continued U.S. industrial
competitiveness is heavily dependent on the prowess of our R&D
laboratories. Without a superior technical position, we could not be a
force in technology selection or in the pace of innovation. The breakup
of the Bell System has created a national challenge to ensure that the
new environment has at least the R&D capabilities of the old. Certainly,
AT&T is fully dedicated to continuing the innovative strengths of
AT&T Bell Laboratories. However, the communications industry is
much more fragmented than it was, and there are no means for
managing it collectively. This is in sharp contrast to the major U.S.
R&D competitor, Japan, which has numerous mechanisms for guiding
its collective R&D efforts at the national level. Ironically, Japan has
succeeded with its high technology by using methods, including
statistical quality control, largely copied from the old Bell System.
Ensuring the future prowess of our R&D laboratories will take more
than blind faith that competition among our R&D enterprises will spur
results that are more innovative and cover wider domains than the
collectively managed enterprises abroad. Success will come from
meeting two broad challenges posed by the new environment. First,
our industries in general must continue to devote the needed resources
to ensure steady streams of innovation from each R&D laboratory.
And second, in this new environment, each of the R&O laboratories
must continue to add its innovations promptly to the advancement of
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THE EVOLUTION OF INCHOATION TECHNOLOGIES
27
science by continuing free and open dialogues within the technical
communities.
Regulation
Few actions can throttle the flow of technology and slow the pace
of innovation more than regulatory actions. In general, regulatory
actions direct an entire industry or the most able within that industry.
Actions are usually based on issues other than technology selection
or pace, but the result may have enormous impact on technology.
Regulating an entire industry always has the potential peril of handi-
capping every one of the affected domestic companies and of benefiting
every one of the foreign competitors. Regulators must acknowledge
that the nation's major innovations will continue to come from its most
able enterprises, and that through their action or inaction- they often
have the power to throttle the outputs of these enterprises.
This throttling of technology comes from action as well as inaction.
For example, legislative action ruled AT&T out of the international
satellite business and thus led to the disbanding of the pioneering
Telstar satellite development team, an act that hardly accelerated the
flow of satellite technology to the marketplace. Regulatory inaction
delayed the availability of cellular radiotelephones to the public by a
decade after AT&T had the technology available.
At AT&T we are still experiencing a regulatory environment that
restricts information flow within our business and favors competitors
who have not contributed to the technology and have trivial R`&D
capabilities. Such regulation places us in an environment that is
insensitive to the funding of R&D that can malice a contribution not
only to our business, but to the nation at large. As hard as we try to
offset these handicaps, they remain a factor in our ability to maintain
the flow of innovation.
Technical Standards
Technical standards are vital to the evolution of the Information
Age. New products must not only be compatible with each other, but
also with older products. And the standards must be firm enough to
ensure compatibility, and prompt enough to ensure rapid introduction
of new technology. Indeed, rapid progress seems to depend on prompt
standards or no standards. Almost-at-hand standards encourage de-
velopers to wait and discourage researchers working on alternative
options.
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JOHN S. MAYO
In the past, key industry leaders developed the technology and
brought it promptly to the marketplace. AT&T technology rapidly
became the standard for the telecommunications industry, and IBM
set powerful standards in the computing field. In today's new environ-
ment, no single enterprise can pioneer the standards. For example,
AT&T's UNIX operating system grew out of telecommunications,
but it is rapidly becoming a worldwide computing standard.
Fu~thennore, telecommunications has `' shrunk '' the globe, so stand-
ards must increasingly be global. In working to set global standards,
the technologist has encountered severe political issues, such as "one
nation, one vote." Attention to the global marketplace has created an
increasing tendency to set up technical standards before new products
emerge. That approach has great impact on technology selection and
is sure to delay the flow of new technology because of the substantial
risk in introducing products in parallel with the standards deliberations.
Unfortunately, these frustrations, which have plagued the international
standards scene for years, are now characterizing the domestic scene.
The political motivations in domestic standard setting are greatly
enhanced in the new environment, and the ability of domestic standards
bodies to handle the issues is yet to be proven. A major challenge is
to try to separate the political and technical issues, with the hope that
the technical issues can be resolved promptly.
The Embedded Technology Base
Three examples illustrate the force of the embedded base: silicon
circuits, lightwave systems, and magnetic bubbles.
The world's investment in silicon circuit fabrication facilities is
estimated to be $15 billion. Most electronic products in the field are
based on silicon, and the popular "direction" of the past decade has
been, "If it can be done in silicon, it will." Until recently, almost 100
percent of the integrated circuit R&D was silicon based, partly due to
the momentum of the embedded base, and partly due to the power of
that technology.
Lightwave is a counterexample. Although there was no embedded
base, enormous R&D resources have been devoted to that technology.
The marketplace views lightwave as a killer technology, and tends to
favor it over the embedded base.
Magnetic bubble technology was a potential killer that has been
forced, at least for the present, to a relatively minor role. The power
of the embedded base of magnetic disks and silicon random access
memories drove cost reductions in these technologies as steep as the
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THE EVOLUTION OF INFO~AT10N T~CHNOLOCIES
29
learning curve for bubbles. As a result, R&D in bubble technology
diminished over the years and its learning curve slowed. So it will be
a long time, if ever, before magnetic bubbles displace the embedded
base. Josephson junction and other cryogenic devices appear to suffer
the same fate, though they have never gotten as close to the competition
as did magnetic bubbles. Both bubbles and cryogenics appear to be
niche technologies at best.
THE INFORMATION AGE
Let me conclude by looking ahead. Considering the information
technologies and their limits, pending new technologies, and forces
controlling selection and pace, we can construct a pretty good picture
of the technology of tomorrow. Whether this technology comes fast
or slow, from our traditional R&D laboratories or from Japan or
elsewhere, it is clearly leading us quickly into the Information Age.
What does this mean to society? This section considers some of the
expected changes when information technologies will assist the mind
much as the industrial revolution's technology assists the muscle.
Computers Everywhere
The industrial revolution produced the now mature age of motors-
which we take for granted. All of us are surrounded by motors, from
the large ones in our cars and boats to the small ones scattered about
our households. As the Information Age matures, we will increasingly
be surrounded by computers, from large ones handling major home or
business tasks to a multitude of microcomputers in our cars, appliances,
toys, games, entertainment centers potentially everywhere. And we
will think no more of computers lying idle in gadgets we hardly ever
use, than we Worry "~out unused motors in our homes today.
Computers are becoming so widespread and low cost that we can
afford to take them for granted, too.
Overcoming Geography
The Information Age has another dimensio~bndging distance or
geography. The interlinking of computers, people, machines, and data
bases by the telecommunications network adds a new dimension of
excitement. The Information Age will probably not offer electronic
transport of matter, but it will do the next best thing. It will sense and
transmit the remote environment to your presence via audio, video,
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JOHNS. MAYO
and data. Such benefits depend in large part on the increasingly digital
nature of the electronic world, with digital connectivity becoming
universally available. Independent of geography, then, machines can
talk to machines, machines can talk to people and people to machines,
and—of course, as usual people can talk to people, but with expanded
options such as video conferencing.
It is increasingly feasible for people to conduct business from
wherever they happen to be by accessing more and more capable
telecommunications services and links back to their usual points of
contact. One can even envision a "telepresence" using sensor-equipped
robots to transmit perceptions back to the user. The user could "move"
through scenes and even manipulate parts of the environment at long
distance.
New Services
Information technology makes possible an expanding family of
services such as financial transactions from home and office com-
puters and entertainment, shopping, and accessing of data bases by
video and telephone links. Electronic mail and the ability to leave
telephone messages are developing, though slower than the technology
allows. Increasingly economical equipment can control energy use in
auto, home, and office; and it can monitor security and report alarms
by the automatic dialing of emergency services. A wide range of direct-
dialing, teleconferencing, and announcement services are available on
the telecommunications network.
The intelligent telecommunications network also makes it increas-
ingly possible for users to have designated calls forwarded to another
location, to have distinctive ringing identify calls from a specified set
of telephone numbers, and to activate traces on nuisance calls. The
network's intelligence also makes possible a wide variety of services
such as the ability to dial one national number from anywhere in the
country to be connected to the nearest emergency auto service,
hospital, or any number of important services. Another potential
innovation is to assign telephone numbers to people rather than
telephones. By keeping the computer informed ofthe nearest telephone,
you could designate calls to be routed automatically to you—wherever
you might be, at your office, home, car, or at some hotel while on a
tnp. The same network intelligence is at the heart of cellular radio
technology, which makes it potentially feasible for every car to have
a telephone. This mobile phone capability is now spreading rapidly.
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THE EVOLUTION OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES
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Of course it works just as well for personal portable phones as for car
phones.
Universal Information Service
Early telephone pioneers wisely and quickly realized that achieving
the full potential of the telephone depended on every phone being
connectable with every other one. That realization is remarkable
because it came when few people had phones, when phones were
interconnected in small clusters to serve neighborhoods and businesses.
And it came, despite the clear fact that any individual phone, over a
lifetime of use, would actually need to connect to the tiniest fraction
of the total telephone population.
So it is for individual computers. The concept of universal information
service recognizes that every computer, data base, or smart terminal
must be connectable with every other, even though most of the possible
connections will never actually be needed. Today, clusters of data
networks are growing in selected neighborhoods and many businesses.
Fortunately, the telephone network is able to interconnect these
clusters. But, for a variety of reasons, total connectivity falls far short
of what is needed for universal information service. Achieving this
goal will be a great challenge for the information technology and
service industries perhaps more so than universal telephone service
was in the past.
Video Data Bases
High-speed digital transmission—using the ever-increasing infor-
mation-carrying capacity of lightwave systems—could make video
communications and pictorial data bases as widespread as today's
telephone service. And this prodigious capacity could also be used to
carry high-speed data for processing by intelligent machines. These
machines could search huge quantities of transmitted data, selecting
and storing only the particular information—perhaps a news item,
stock quote, message, or even a movie- that fits their users' needs or
interests.
Expert Systems
The combination of increasingly powerful integrated circuits, com-
puting technology, and software should enhance knowledge and allow
increasingly expert software to take over some tasks done by expert
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JOHN S. MAYO
humans. An example is the expertise required to generate more accurate
weather forecasts ranging from global forecasting to the kind of area
forecasting that would permit us to manage crops better and to
accurately predict the landfall of hurricanes. These expanded tech-
nological capabilities will often be applied to create "expert" systems
in services ranging from legal and financial advice to medical diagno-
sis not necessarily to replace the doctor or lawyer, but to make such
services available conveniently and inexpensively to large numbers of
people. Expert systems exist today and perform specialized tasks in
the telephone network.
Engineering Perspective
From an engineering perspective, the electronic equipment of the
Information Age all looks much the same. It is digital systems made
up mostly of integrated circuits mounted on printed wiring boards.
The equipment is extremely compact in terms of number of gates per
circuit board. Interface equipment is usually a keyboard, telephone
lines, cathode ray tube, and/or liquid crystal display. Plasma panel
and large liquid crystal displays will displace some of the cathode ray
tubes, but not for full-motion video for some time. The equipment is
increasingly reliable, and large systems will contain extensive diag-
nostic subsystems for maintenance. Most reconfigurations and rear-
rangements will be made via software rather than by manual operations.
The equipment is increasingly lower in cost per function, so larger and
larger systems will be of the throwaway type, much as low-function
pocket calculators are today. The systems will increasingly be designed
by machines through even more powerful computer aids to design.
And, of course, the software content of the systems will grow, but
hardware will also grow to ease software burdens. The challenge for
engineers will shift toward the two ends of the spectrum of work:
process development and computer-aided design systems to support
design on the one end, and systems architecture and higher-level
design on the other. The fast pace of technology, the exciting systems
possibilities, and the expanding product opportunities put the Infor-
mation Age designer in an enviable position.
CONCLUSION
The information technologies are far from exhausted, though the
limits of the major technologies are well known. A number of new
technologies are emerging, and progress should continue at a fast pace
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THE EVOLUTION OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES
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for at least a decade or two. With the possible exception of integrated
optics, during this time evolution is not likely to be dominated by new
killer technologies. More likely, the rapid pace of current developments
will continue to create ever more favorable economics, and extend
the known technologies into new domains. The forces that control the
pace of innovation and technology selection are not likely to change
substantially unless the restructuring of the telephone industry produces
unexpected results or overseas competition forces government action.
Good innovations will continue to be rapidly pulled into the market-
place. The resulting richness of high-quality, low-cost technology
should help create a better society an Information Age with a host
of new computing and telecommunications services to make life more
pleasant, productive, and interesting.
Comments
ERNEST S. KUH
Professor of Electrical Engineering
University of California, Berkeley
I would like to begin by proposing a simpleminded model of technology
evolution for the mathematically inclined. Using the state-space analogy, which
is familiar to most young electrical, mechanical, and aerospace engineers, we
may represent the interaction of the four key elements of technology evolution
that John Mayo defines: (1) technology base, (2) research and development,
(3) sequencing, and (4) standards.
In my proposed model, the state of the dynamic system corresponds to the
technology base in Dr. Mayo's analysis; the input corresponds to R&D; the
dynamics of the system correspond to sequencing; and finally, the set of
constraints corresponds to standards. It might be possible then to use this
analogy to introduce, for some technologies at least, a quantitative analysis
of evolution through the technology gate. Models aside, the second part of
Dr. Mayo's presentation gives a brief account of recent and prospective
innovation in information processing technology. I would like to respond to
that portion of the presentation with three comments.
First, that which impresses me the most are advances in lightwave tech-
nology. When I worked at Bell Laboratories 30 years ago, I was designing
repeaters for submarine cable using vacuum tube technology. The progress
made during the last 30 years in transmission is remarkable.
Second, the technologies John Mayo did not discuss were such mundane
things as the display technology, punters, and workstations. Though these
technologies already play a major role in today's markets, I believe that their
importance to scientific and engineering research and development to the
evolution of information technology will be profound. The synergy between
Representative terms from entire chapter:
integrated circuits
