News from Finland: a Guided tour in the Cyberspace - David Farber as the Guide. Reported by Reijo S

[David Farber <>]

News from Finland:  a Guided tour in the Cyberspace - David Farber as
the Guide.


Reported by Reijo Sulonen


It was on the 7th of June. David Farber, on his fourth visit with his
wife Gigi to this country of thousands of lakes and nightless summers,
had promised on request to deepen the views of  the  always curious
Nordic audience on the future gigabit network world. The event had
drawn to the Otaniemi campus of Helsinki University of Technology a
mixed audience: a good number of industrialists and scientists from
various Scandinavian countries and, to the surprise of everybody, a
bunch of leading bureaucrats from the Finnish government agencies.


The event started under favourable auspices. The night before the
Finnish National Opera had produced a most remarkable performance of
Lohengrin. Dave could not understand how a nation of the size of the
population of Bronx could ever be able to put forward a shattering
production of a Germanic mythic story of true Wagnerian dimensions. Not
only that but also a brand new opera house fit to host the greatest
drama of Western culture. The only complaint I heard from Dave and Gigi
was the shortness of this performance of 270 minutes.


Dave started the tour by a historical view. His teaching was that
telecommunication has during all its history opened possibilities the
significance of which has been impossible to predict. The most
promising application for telephone at its time of conception was the
distribution of opera to a wider audience. The computer networks as we
know them today were designed to share computer capacity among a group
of scientists on the US continent. We all know afterwards how
ridiculously wrong these dreams turned out to be.


Encouraged by false predictions made by others Dave did not hesitate to
attack the future himself. It was, however, wisely a discussion more on
the issues than on the solutions. The landscape for the structure and
ownership of the future information highways was vividly painted. To
get information delivered to the consumers the gigabit highways are
not enough. You need the village roads and final driveways leading to
the premises of the ordinary citizen. The telecommunications industry
in the worldwide turmoil of liberalisation, the battle on who will be
building this infrastructure is undecided. So is the issue of what and
whose information will be transported in the trucks running on these
worldwide information highways.


Crucial to the development is to get commerce going in the cyberspace.
Networks as they exist today are rudimentary to support large scale
commerce in any meaningful sense. Bullet proof security, electronic
money and privacy issues must be solved in order to guarantee normal
life as we have seen it. The deepness of these issues was eloquently
illustrated by Dave as challenges to the intra- and international
legislature; he saw easy solutions only for easy problems.


The cyberspace applications will not be on the mass entertainment side.
During all this century, he pointed out, the deflated amount of money
used per household for entertainment has remained constant. Video on
demand facilitated by fibre networks is not at all evident. Current
players are not willing to give away their position easily; they can
hit hard due to the large margins they areenjoying today. Being a man
of culture Dave saw more possibilities in the more refined boutique
like information services. What a pleasure  it would be for a civilise
d person to get hold of the immortal Toscanini performance of Verdi's
Requiem  from 1938 deep hidden in the archives of the former RCA!
Finally the century old dream of delivering music to homes via
telecommunication coming true!


In the technical part of the presentation the image of the ultimate
fusion between computation and telecommunication was painted.
Practically error free and cheap transmission bandwidth can be used to
create a megacomputer where all the computer memories are united. After
the minor information security problems have been removed I can access
from my computer any computer memory in the world! The computer network
will become the computer bus serving the millions of machines connected
to it. In the meantime the computer architectures and operating systems
have to be rethought.


On request Dave ventured to touch the role the governments could have
in the formulation of the cyberspace. Governments in his view have not
been very successful building anything of permanent value. Their role
should be more to lay the ground for development than to develop
themselves. Support of non profitable operations over the years does
not lead anywhere. The French Minitel is an example for others to
avoid. For small nations like those in Scandinavia his advise was to
avoid the ubiquitous government planning committees.


In four hours Dave guided us around in the cyberspace: its history, the
new possibilities for commerce and applications, its challenges on the
societies and governments, the re-evaluation of computer and
telecommunication technologies, like only he can do. And away we went.
The scientists to make marginal improvements in our favourite theories,
the industrialists to produce the next unit of their deficient product,
and the leading bureaucrats to staff their next committee on
information technology policies.


So the world remained the same despite the presentation?
Perhaps not ... in July all the watches in the world have to be
adjusted by one second to recover from a disturbance in the rotation of
the earth. The origin of the disturbance is unknown to the science; in
Finland there are though many who think it is all because of Dave's seminar.