Imagine the plight of a restaurant captain if I called to say, “My name is Gates. My wife made us a reservation for some time next month. Would you mind checking to see when it is?”
“I’m sorry, sir, do you know the date of the reservation?” the captain would be likely to ask.
“No, that’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“Would that have been on a weekend?” the captain asks.
He knows he’s going to be paging through the book by hand, and he’s hoping to reduce the task by focusing the dates in any possible way.
A restaurant can use a paper-based reservation book because the total number of reservations isn’t large. An airline reservation system is not a book but a database containing an enormous quantity of information—flights, air fares, bookings, seat assignments, and billing information—for hundreds of flights a day worldwide. American Airlines’ SABRE reservation system stores the information—4.4 trillion bytes of it, which is more than 4 million million characters—on computer hard disks. If the information in the SABRE system were copied into a hypothetical paper reservation book, it would require more than 2 billion pages.
For as long as we’ve had paper documents or collections of documents, we have been ordering information linearly, with indexes, tables of contents, and cross-references of various kinds to provide alternate means of navigation. In most offices filing cabinets are organized by customer, vendor, or project in alphabetical order, but to speed access, often a duplicate set of correspondence is filed chronologically. Professional indexers add value to a book by building an alternative way to find information. And before library catalogs were computerized, new books were entered into the paper catalogs on several different cards so a reader could find a book by its title or any one of its authors or topics. This redundancy was to make information easier to find.
When I was young I loved my family’s 1960 World Book Encyclopedia. Its heavy bound volumes contained just text and pictures. They showed what Edison’s phonograph looked like, but didn’t let me listen to its scratchy sound. The encyclopedia had photographs of a fuzzy caterpillar changing into a butterfly, but there was no video to bring the transformation to life. It also would have been nice if it had quizzed me on what I had read, or if the information had always been up-to-date. Naturally I wasn’t aware of those drawbacks then. When I was eight, I began to read the first volume. I was determined to read straight through every volume. I could have absorbed more if it had been easy to read all the articles about the sixteenth century in sequence or all the articles pertaining to medicine. Instead I read about “Garter Snakes” then “Gary, Indiana,” then “Gas.” But I had a great time reading the encyclopedia anyway and kept at it for five years until I reached the Ps. Then I discovered the Encyclopaedia Britannica, with its greater sophistication and detail. I knew I would never have the patience to read all of it. Also, by then, satisfying my enthusiasm for computers was taking up most of my spare time.
Current print encyclopedias consist of nearly two dozen volumes, with millions of words of text and thousands of illustrations, and cost hundreds or thousands of dollars. That’s quite an investment, especially considering how rapidly the information gets out of date. Microsoft Encarta, which is outselling print and other multi-media encyclopedias, comes on a single 1-ounce CD-ROM (which stands for Compact Disc Read Only Memory). Encarta includes 26,000 topics with 9 million words of text, 8 hours of sounds, 7,000 photographs and illustrations, 800 maps, 250 interactive charts and tables, and 100 animations and video clips. It costs less than $100. If you want to know how the Egyptian “ud” (a musical instrument) sounds, hear the 1936 abdication speech of Great Britain’s King Edward VIII, or see an animation explaining how a machine works, the information’s all there—and no paper-based encyclopedia will ever have it.
Articles in a print encyclopedia often are followed by a list of articles on related subjects. To read them, you have to find the referenced article, which may be in another volume. With a CD-ROM encyclopedia all you have to do is click on the reference and the article will appear. On the information highway, encyclopedia articles will include links to related subjects—not just those covered in the encyclopedia, but those in other sources. There will be no limit to how much detail you will be able to explore on a subject that interests you. In fact, an encyclopedia on the highway will be more than just a specific reference work—it will be, like the library card catalog, a doorway to all knowledge.
Today, printed information is hard to locate. It’s almost impossible to find all the best information—including books, news articles, and film clips—on a specific topic. It is extremely time-consuming to assemble the information you can find. For example, if you wanted to read biographies of all the recent Nobel Prize laureates, compiling them could take an entire day. Electronic documents, however, will be interactive. Request a kind of information, and the document responds. Indicate that you’ve changed your mind, and the document responds again. Once you get used to this sort of system, you find that being able to look at information in different ways makes that information more valuable. The flexibility invites exploration, and the exploration is rewarded with discovery.
You’ll be able to get your daily news in a similar way. You’ll be able to specify how long you want your newscast to last. This will be possible because you’ll be able to have each of the news stories selected individually. The newscast assembled for and delivered only to you might include world news from NBC, the BBC, CNN, or the Los Angeles Times, with a weather report from a favorite local TV meteorologist—or from any private meteorologist who wanted to offer his or her own service. You will be able to request longer stories on the subjects that particularly interest you and just highlights on others. If, while you are watching the newscast, you want more than has been put together, you will easily be able to request more background or detail, either from another news broadcast or from file information.
Among all the types of paper documents, narrative fiction is one of the few that will not benefit from electronic organization. Almost every reference book has an index, but novels don’t because there is no need to be able to look something up in a novel. Novels are linear. Likewise, we’ll continue to watch most movies from start to finish. This isn’t a technological judgment—it is an artistic one: Their linearity is intrinsic to the storytelling process. New forms of interactive fiction are being invented that take advantage of the electronic world, but linear novels and movies will still be popular.
The highway will make it easy to distribute digital documents cheaply, whatever their form. Millions of people and companies will be creating documents and publishing them on the network. Some documents will be aimed at paying audiences and some will be free to anyone who wants to pay attention. Digital storage is fantastically inexpensive. Hard-disk drives in personal computers will soon cost about $0.15 for a megabyte (million bytes) of information. To put this in perspective, 1 megabyte will hold about 700 pages of text, so the cost is something like $0.00021 per page—about one two-hundredth what the local copy center would charge at $0.05 a page. And because there is the option of reusing the storage space for something else, the cost is actually the cost of storage per unit time—in other words, of renting the space. If we assume just a three-year average lifetime for the hard-disk drive, the amortized price per page per year is $0.00007. And storage is getting cheaper all the time. Hard-disk prices have been dropping by about 50 percent per year for the last several years.