Head Librarian Cathy Wilson asked us to write about technology past and technology future in the context of SCTE's 40th anniversary. That got me thinking about how hard it is to look a long way forward.
      Back in the early 1960s, as the most junior employee of a startup software company in Princeton, NJ, I was asked to frame our response to a request for proposal we had just received. A major city asked us to bid to build a new computer system for the board of education. They wanted an interactive system that would permit students and teachers to type in any question, and the system would provide the answer. This was a very innovative concept for the technology of the time: the only interactive terminals were Teletype machines. The idea was intriguing.
      But the request seemed out of range of even the most powerful computer system — the first commercial computers had been installed only a decade before — and I told my boss that we should "not bid." Large-scale software projects weren't easy to come by, so he asked why. I said what they wanted was simply impossible: "They want a system where you can get the answer to any question. That's so far away from reality that we shouldn't respond at all. Nobody can build such a system today — nobody will ever be able to build it."
      I thought of this as I was Googling for the 10th time today. When I'm doing any kind of research, I always start with Google: "When did this company start selling that product?" "Where did the CTO work before?" "How can I get in touch with Joe?" I may not get the answer to any question just yet, but the Web comes close — and it's getting better every day.
      I was wrong about how far technology could advance in 40 years or so. Getting from "never" to "close" leveraged the compounding effect of Moore's law over all that time, some very smart people to develop and refine clever search algorithms, and an innovative business model to fund the computing horsepower required to offer Google for free.
      It's hard to predict technology advancements over 40 years, but cut the period to 15 or 20 years and it's easier. I had the great privilege of leading R&D at Prodigy for a decade after it was started in early 1984. Most of our vision for the future is now part of everyone's day-to-day reality: PCs in most homes, connected online with high-speed access over cable and telephone lines; changing business models for newspapers, shopping, banking and more.