it about this machine? Why is this machine so interesting? Why has it been so influential?

Ah ahm, I'll give you my point of view on it. I remember reading a magazine article

a long time ago ah when I was ah twelve years ago maybe, in I think it was Scientific American.

I'm not sure. And the article ahm proposed to measure the efficiency of locomotion for

ah lots of species on planet earth to see which species was the most efficient at getting

from point A to point B. Ah and they measured the killer calories that each one expended.

So ah they ranked them all and I remember that ahm...ah the Condor, Condor was the most

efficient at [CLEARS THROAT] getting from point A to point B. And humankind, the crown

of creation came in with a rather unimpressive showing about a third of the way down the

list. So ah that didn't look so great. But ah, let me do this over again.

I remember ah reading an article when I was about twelve years old. I think it might have

been Scientific American where they measured the efficiency of locomotion of all these

species on planet earth. How many killer calories did they expend to get from point A to point

B? And the Condor came in at the top of the list ah surpassed everything else. And humans

came in about a third of the way down the list which was not such a great showing for

the crown of creation. And ah but somebody there had the imagination

to test the efficiency of a human riding a bicycle. A human riding a bicycle blew away

the Condor all the way off the top of the list. And it made a really big impression

on me that we humans are tool builders. And that we can fashion tools that amplify these

inherent abilities that we have to spectacular magnitudes. And so for me, a computer has

always been a bicycle of the mind. Ah something that takes us far beyond our inherent abilities.

And ah I think we're just at the early stages of this tool. Very early stages. And we've

come only a very short distance. And it's still in its formation, but already we've

seen enormous changes. I think that's nothing compared to what's coming in the next hundred

years. In program six we're going to look at some

of the past predictions of why people have been so wrong about the future. And one of

the notions is that today's vision of a standalone computer is just as limited as those past

visions of it being only a number cruncher. What's the difference philosophically between

a network machine and a standalone machine? Let me answer that question a slightly different

way. There have been, if you look at why the majority

of people have bought these things so far, ah there have been two real explosions that

have propelled the industry forward. The first one ah really happened in 1977. And it was

the spreadsheets. I remember when ah Dan Fylstra who ran the company that marketed the first

spreadsheet, walked not my office at Apple one day and pulled out this disk from his

vest pocket and said, "I...I have this incredible new program. I call it a visual calculator."

And it became Visicalc. And that's what really drove, propelled the Apple to...to the success

it achieved more than any other single event. And...and with ah the invention of Lotus 123,

and I think it was 1982, that's what really propelled the IBM PC to the level of success

that it achieved. So that was the first explosion was the spreadsheet. Ahm the second major

explosion has driven our, the desktop industry has been desktop publishing. [MISC BACKGROUND]

The...the second really bit explosion in our industry has been desktop publishing. Happened

in 1985 with the Macintosh and the laser writer printer. And at that point people could start

to do on their desktops things that only typesetters and printers could do prior to that. And that's

been a very big revolution in publishing. And those are really, those two explosions

have been the only two real major revolutions which have caused a lot of people to buy these

things and use them. Ah the third one is starting to happen now. And the third one is let's

do for human to human communication what spreadsheets did for financial planning and what public,

desktop publishing did for publishing. Let's revolutionize it using these desktop devices.

And we're already starting to see the signs of that.

As an example in an organization, we're starting to see that as business conditions change

faster and faster with each year, ah we cannot change our management hierarchical organization

very fast relative to the changing business conditions. We can't have somebody working

for a new boss every week. We also can't change our geographic organization very fast. As

a matter of fact even slower than the management one. We can't be moving people around the

country every week. But we can change an electronic organization like that. And what's starting

to happen is as we start to link these computers together with sophisticated networks and great

user interfaces, we're starting to be able to create clusters of people working on a

common task in a s... you know literally in fifteen minutes worth of setup. And these

fifteen people can work together extremely efficiently no matter where they are geographically.

And no matter who they work for hierarchically. And these organizations can live for as long

as they're needed and then vanish. And we're finding we can reorganize our companies electronically

ah very rapidly. And that's the only type of organization that can begin to keep pace

with the changing business conditions. And I believe that this collaborative model

has existed in higher education for a long time. But we're starting to see it applied

into the commercial world as well. And this is going to be the third major revolution

that these desktop computers provide is revolutionizing human to human communication in group work.

We call it interpersonal computing. In the 1985 we did personal computing. Ah and now

we're going to extend that as we network these things to interpersonal computing.

What was the image of the computer in the mid 196Os or whenever you first saw one? And

where are we now? I ahm, I first saw my first computer when

I was twelve. [MUMBLES] I saw my first computer when I was twelve. And it was at NASA. We

had a local NASA center nearby. And it was a terminal, which was connected to a big computer

somewhere and I got a timesharing account on it. And I was fascinated by this thing.

And I saw my second computer a few years later which was really the first desktop computer

ever made. It was made by Hewlett Packard. It was called the 9100-A. And it ran a language

called Basic. And it was very large. It had a very small cathode ray tube on it for display.

And I got a chance to play with one of those maybe in 1968 or 9. And ah spent every spare

moment I had trying to write programs I was so fascinated by this. Ah and so I was probably

fairly lucky. And then my introduction to computers very rapidly moved from a terminal

to within maybe twelve months or so, actually seeing one of the first, probably the first

desktop computer ever...ever really produced. And ah so my point of view never really changed

from being able to get my arms around it even though my arms didn't quite fit around that

first one. What was the role, how have personal computers

changed the landscape of computers? I mean back then it was centralized power, it was

in a mainframe. Now we have three times as much power at the fringe than we have in the

center, five times as much power. How did the PC change the world?

Well, though the analogy is nowhere perfect and certainly ah one needs to factor out the

environmental concerns of the analogy as well. Ah there is a lot to be said for comparing

it to going from trains, from passenger trains to automobiles. And ah the advent of the automobile

gave us a personal freedom of transportation. In the same way the advent of the computer

gave us the ability to start to use computers without having to convince other people that

we needed to use computers. And the biggest effect of the personal computer revolution

has been to ahm allow millions and millions of people to experience computers themselves

decades before they ever would have in the old paradigm. And to allow them to ah participate

in ah the making of choices and controlling their own destiny using these tools.

But it has created ah, it has created problems. And the largest problems are that ah now that

we have all these very powerful tools, we're still islands and we're still not really connecting

these people using these powerful tools together. And that's really been the challenge of the

last few years and the next several years is how to connect these things back together

so that we can, can rebuild a fabric of these things rather than just individual points

of light if you will. And ahm get the benefit of both, the passenger train and the automobile.

What's the vision behind the next machine? Everything that ah, that we've done in our

[PAUSES] Everything I've done with computers in my life has been along pretty much a single

vector. Ah and next is just one more point on that same vector. Ah in this case what

we...we observed was that the computing power we could give to an individual was an order

magnitude more than the PCs were given. In the sense that people want to do many things

at once and you really need true multi tasking. We really did want to ahm start to network

these things together in very sophisticated networks.

So the technology to build that became available. And most important we saw a way to build a

software system that was about ten times as powerful than any PC. And where new software

could be created in a fourth of the time. So we spent four years with ah fifty to a

hundred of the best software people we could find building this new software system. And

it's turned out beautifully. Ah what happens in our industry... [TAPE CUT]

what's the vision behind NEXT? Ahm it's not so much different than everything

I've ever done in my life with computers starting with the Apple II and the Macintosh, and now

NEXT which is if you ah believe that these are the most incredible tools we've ever built

which I do, then the more powerful tool we can give to people, the more they can do with

it. And in this case ah we...we found a way to do two or three things that were real breakthroughs.

Number one was to put a much more powerful computer in front of people for about the

same price as a PC. The second was to integrate that networking into the computer so we can

begin to make this next revolution within a personal computing. And the PCs so far have

not been able to do that very well. And the third thing, and maybe the most important

was to create a whole new software architecture from the ground up that lets us build these

new types of applications and let's them, let us, let's us build them in 25 percent

of the time that it normally takes to do on a PC. So ah we spent ahm four years with 50

to a hundred of the best software people that I know creating a whole new software platform

from the ground up. And the way our industry works is that you create this platform software

first and then you go out and you get people to write new applications on top of it. Well

the...the height that these new applications can soar is...is enabled or limited by the

platform software. And there's only been three systems that have

ever been successful in the whole history of desktop computing and that was the Apple

IIs platform software of which there wasn't too much. The IBM PC and Macintosh. So we're

attempting to create the fourth platform software standard and hopefully we'll succeed because

it will allow these applications to be written which far far exceed in capacity what can

be done in today's machines. What happens when you have a network that

allows the relative minorities in a whole different area come together. How does that

change the democracy? I don't know.

Okay. But...but what I have seen is I've seen interpersonal

computing happening at our own company. Or maybe the best way to put it is ahm, I remember

when the first spreadsheet came out. I saw it fly through Apple as well as other companies.

And when we ah, when we invented desktop publishing of course it influenced Apple first.

And I've seen the same thing happen with interpersonal computing here at NEXT. We decided to put

a NEXT machine on every employee's desktop about 18 months ago and connect them with

the very highspeed networking that's built in. And I've seen the revolution here with

my own eyes. And it's it's actually larger than the first two. Let me give you some examples.

Ah if we want to ah, if we're going to be doing a special project let's say with a company,

and we. and let's say the company is called ahm, what's your...

WGBH. WGBH. we're going to be doing a special project

with WGBH. And what we'll do is we'll create a ah special mailbox, WGBH and we'll put twenty

people on it that are going to be helping on this project. Now these twenty people will

be from all over our company. From marketing, from sales, from engineering, some from manufacturing.

Maybe some from our Boston office so they can be close by. And ah if one sends a message

to this mailbox, [SNAPS FINGER] they'll all get it like that, instantly.

And if ah one sends a reply they'll copy the whole mailbox so the rest of the team members

get to read ah the intellectual content going back and forth. And everyone on this, in this

mailbox will probably get around 30 mail messages a day. And they'll spend about twenty minutes,

thirty minutes reading these and answering these per day. And it will be like a beehive.

Now this project is very important for our company and I want to make sure it's getting

off right. So I'll put my own name on this mailbox and l'll see these thirty mail messages

fly by. All of the disagreements and the arguments and the thoughts and the decisions. And I

can just let it fly by and read it. I can do some background coaching with a few people

if I think they're a little off track. I can get right on the network and kibbutz if I'd

like. And after a month or so when I know that it's

going well I can take my name off. And so not only is this a way to organize violating

all management and geographic boundaries, it's also a way to manage. Where one can see.

Again the thoughts, disagreements and decisions of a company fly by a manager in a way that