Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1997/12/09
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Fellow LUG Subscribers: An article appeared on page 1 in the "Business Day" section of "The New York Times," Monday, December 8, 1997, featuring Mr. Brian Reid and containing a full color photograph of him. Here are a few paragraphs from the article, "Old Man Bandwidth: Will Commerce Flourish Where Rivers of Wire Converge": Three years ago, Brian Reid came away from a tour of California's missions with an epiphany that today is transforming this cornerstone city (Palo Alto) of Silicon Valley into the nerve center of cyberspace. Mr. Reid, a computer scientist with the DIGITAL EQUIPMENT Corporation, had done pioneering work in the 1970's on the Arpanet, the computer network that would evolve into the Internet. While playing tourist with his fourth-grade daughter in 1994, he realized that each 16th century mission he had visited represented an experiment in urban planning; those that combined the right economic, geographic and social factors eventually blossomed into cities. Just as centers of commerce sprang up along navigable rivers, around natural harbors and parallel to railroad tracks and majaor roads in in earlier centuries, Mr. Reid came to believe that the commercial hubs of the next millenium would take root around pipelines that carry torrents of computer data. "Bandwidth is the delivery vehicle by which these companies sell their goods in the information age," Mr. Reid said last week. "Bandwidth in the late 1990's is important for commerce in the same way as railroads were important in the 1890's and seaports were in the 1790's. It's the way you sell your products." - John W. Lee