Chapter 1: Information Technologies
Americans are so accustomed to the presence of computers in our
daily lives that we are amazed to discover that early computer experts did not
foresee much demand for these specialized machines. For example, the chairman
of IBM, Thomas Watson, stated in the 1940s, “There is a world market for
maybe five computers.” Since then, a succession of breakthroughs has
created a new economic sector: Information Technologies (IT) — the ever
growing variety of ways in which we are able to gather, store, analyze, share,
and display information.
Estimates of the total number of computers in the world now
exceed 500 million, or more than triple the total in 1991. The proportion of
U.S. households with computers has jumped from 15 percent to more than 40
percent. U.S. schools now count one computer for about every six students, up
from one machine for every 63 students in the mid-1980s.
The economic implications of this growth are unmistakable.
Between 1995 and 1998, producers of computer and communications hardware,
software, and services accounted for an average of 35 percent of the U.S. gross
domestic product (GDP). During this same period, IT represented 60 percent of
U.S. corporations' capital investments. On average, 20 U.S. technology and
telecommunications companies are born every day. Industries that are either
major producers or intensive users of IT products and services will employ half
the U.S. workforce by 2006. These jobs will pay significantly higher wages than
jobs in other sectors. For example, in 1996, the 7.4 million people employed in
the IT sector and in IT-related jobs across the economy earned an average of
about $46,000 per year, compared to an average of $28,000 for jobs across the
entire private sector.
Historical Importance of Federal Funding
Much of the
innovation that spawned today's information technologies resulted directly
from Federal investment in science and technology. Starting in 1969, when the
Department of Defense opened its experimental nationwide computer network
through the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), computer networking has
especially benefited from Federal research and development funding. The
National Science Foundation (NSF) extended ARPA's network to civilian
academic users in 1987. These networks marked the convergence of computing and
communications, one of the main drivers of information technologies in the
1990s. Networking — linking computers together to share data — has
since become one of the fastest growing areas of computing. The Internet
emerged from the joint effort by Federal agencies and universities to advance
networking technology.
Federal agencies also contributed to the steady decrease in the
size of computers and the exponential growth of computing power. The
transformation from expensive, room-size computers to laptops vividly
illustrates the way science and technology, through a series of chance events,
sometimes lead us in unforeseen directions.
The period between 1947 and 1960 saw many separate but
ultimately related breakthroughs that combined to produce a revolution in
computer hardware. Electrical engineers invented the transistor and later
developed the integrated circuit; materials scientists discovered
semiconductors and the uses of silicon; and physicists developed the laser. The
laser, once seen as an interesting but unpromising technology, has become the
signal beacon that we use to transmit information, carrying light waves over
optical-fiber networks that connect many parts of the globe. The laser also led
to fundamental advances in lithography, the process used to etch transistors
onto silicon chips to form modern microprocessors. In 1949, Popular Mechanics
predicted: “Where a computer like the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum
tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum
tubes and weigh only 1.5 tons.” In the days before the transistor, this
may have seemed a daring prediction, but today we are on the verge of
technology that will create microprocessors as small as a molecule.
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The Internet Economy
The Internet's rapid growth in popularity is
unparalleled in the history of communications. Radio existed for 38 years
before 50 million tuned in; TV took 13 years to reach that benchmark. The
Internet crossed that popularity threshold within four years after opening to
the general public in 1991, and today an estimated80 million Americans have
access at home or at work.
The Internet has quickly become a significant economic
force, offering a new avenue for consumer and business-to-business
transactions. The U.S. “Internet economy” grew at a compounded annual
rate of 174.5 percent between 1995 and 1998, as compared with 2.8 percent for
the national economy as a whole. The Internet economy generated revenues
totaling an estimated $301 billion in 1998. Employing more than a million
people, the Internet economy now rivals the automobile industry and other major
established sectors in size. Retail sales on the Internet are also climbing
rapidly. In 1997, private analysts forecast that the value of Internet
retailing could reach $7 billion by 2000. In fact, the 1998 level was 50
percent greater than that estimate, causing analysts to revise their estimates
upward to between $40 billion and $80 billion by 2002. Direct,
business-to-business commerce on the Internet is forecast to surpass $1.3
trillion per year by 2002. |
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Forecasting Severe Weather
Advance warning of this May 3, 1999 tornado, made
possible by NWS technology, enabled officials to order the safe evacuation of
millions of residents.
On May 3, 1999, more than 70 tornadoes rampaged across
Oklahoma and Kansas. Several days earlier, National Weather Service (NWS)
forecasters had seen increasing indications in their computer modeling data
that the environment in their region would support severe storms in the coming
days. (NWS supercomputers continuously feed such data to field offices around
the country to help them make twice-daily forecasts.) As the Oklahoma and
Kansas storms developed on May 3, the NWS staff was thoroughly prepared for the
intense work that lay ahead to analyze the storms and predict their likely
paths, enabling real-time forecasts. As a result, some areas were warned of the
impending fury up to 60 minutes before the arrival of severe weather.
More than 1,000 tornadoes occur in the United States
every year. Since the early 1990s, technological progress in detecting,
monitoring, and modeling such storms has doubled average lead times for tornado
warnings, from a nationwide average of less than four minutes to more than 11
minutes. Using the sophisticated Advanced Weather Interactive Processing
System, which is now installed at NWS forecast offices throughout the United
States, forecasters can process, display, and integrate huge amounts of storm
data much more efficiently, adding to the speed and accuracy of warnings to
emergency managers, the media, and the public.Ultimately, with continuing
upgrades of technology and progress in science, the NWS expects to deliver
reliable warnings at least three hours before the onset of severe
weather. |
Rapid Pace of Improvements
Miniaturization causes
prices to spiral downward, making the technology affordable for larger numbers
of small businesses, local governments, schools, libraries, families, and
individuals. During this decade alone, the cost of microprocessors has dropped
sharply, as has the price of silicon-based computer memory. In 1991, the cost
of the processing power required to perform a million instructions per second
— or MIPS, a standard performance metric — was $230. By 1997, the
cost of one MIPS' worth of computing power was $3.42. As a result,
today's desktop and laptop computers pack the processing power equivalent
to what would have been a supercomputer only a few chip-generations ago.
Advances also continue at the high end of computing. State-of-the-art
supercomputers can perform trillions of operations per second. Federal research
in high-performance computing envisions machines within the next ten years that
will be thousands of times more powerful, performing a quadrillion operations
per second.
Vast increases in computing power have led scientists and
engineers to tackle problems once considered beyond the limits of human study
— such challenges as long-range weather forecasting, modeling
thermonuclear explosions, simulating variations in aeronautical design, and
designing new drugs. These efforts depend on improvements in computer software
as well as hardware. Mathematics holds the key to the efficient trade-offs in
processing speeds, message passing, and use of memory that make up programming
code. Recent advances in this area of science have generated a proliferation of
software for professional and everyday uses. In terms of economic impact, the
software and computer services sector has more than doubled in size since 1990,
growing to a $152 billion business by 1998 and roughly equaling the size of the
computer hardware sector.
The industrialized world has integrated information technologies
throughout almost all economic sectors and social institutions. We use IT when
we listen to a weather forecast, enjoy music on a CD, or watch a movie on DVD.
The free exchange of information made possible by the Internet has had a
democratizing influence in other parts of the world, and small but innovative
entrepreneurs now have opportunities to market their ideas on a worldwide scale
that would have been impossible to imagine 20 years ago.
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Libraries With Instant Access
Digital libraries will provide all Americans with
unprecedented access to information.
A $30 million cooperative initiative of several Federal
agencies will soon provide a national library of text, images, sound
recordings, and other materials to every schoolchild (and all other Americans)
with access to the Internet. The library will include countless numbers of
books that are in the public domain, such as the complete works of Shakespeare,
Mark Twain, the Greek philosophers, and the Federalist Papers. In addition,
children will have virtual access to such things as the Apollo 11 command
module, the Gettysburg battlefield, and Rose Kennedy's personal tour of
the John F. Kennedy birthplace.
Students and their teachers will also be able to find a
digital library for math and science education as part of the new initiative.
The collection will include high-quality resources and provide hands-on,
interactive content that makes math and science come alive and enables students
to “learn by doing.”
Technology can help make America's treasures
available to all citizens. It will still be a thrill to visit Ellis Island in
person, but those who can't make the trip will still have online access to
its immigration records. Poetry lovers will still want to own a personal copy
of Dante's Inferno, but every student who needs to read it will be able to
download it instantly — and never have to pay an overdue fine! |
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