🚀 go-pugleaf

<   It's interesting.  Thompson was always referred to as a "futurist", and he
<   figured that meant he was about 20 years ahead of everybody else.  In this
<   case, he's pretty close.
<
I and several others around here have often "speculated" upon this topic.
While not particularly germane to the DeskTop discussion, it is
interesting. We have decided that there are about 5-10, but definately less
than 25 persons, on a campus of 18K students and 18K employees who know
about and use "the network as a computer", there is a community of probably
10% faculty/staff and 50% students who actively use electronic mail, BITNET
listservers, etc. (Engineering is close to 100% for Faculty/Staff/Students,
while Hummanities usage is almost non-existant.) We hung some times on
these catagories and decided that those of us who were active network users
were about 5 years ahead of the electronic mail users, and 5-10 years ahead
of everybody else. 

I've been a member of the World Future Society for quite a few years, and
one of the things that emerges constantly is the simple fact that it takes
a minimum number of years - on the order of 3-5 from the time a new
technology has moved from the Lab to the Factory, for the production lines
to fire up and distribute it.

So if you add another 5 years for ideas to make it through the lab to the
factory floor, the total comes up pretty close to 20 years.

--
William H. Magill 			 Manager, PENNnet Operations Planning
Data Communications and Computing Services (DCCS)  University of Pennsylvania
Internet: magill@dccs.upenn.edu			  magill@eniac.seas.upenn.edu
          magill@upenn.edu 		BITnet:   magill@pennlrsm