Forum dress rehearsal: behind the scenes - includes a related article on the format followed by the Forum, and a related article on the purpose of office automation - director's script for the 1991 platforms for Computing Forum

RELease 1.0, Feb 25, 1991 by Esther Dyson

Power in platforms: what for?

When we went to visit Andy Grove at Intel to invite him to speak at the Forum, we expected to hear about his secret plans for the 986. Instead, Grove pressed us to look at his computer, running Windows 3.0 and displaying an ugly e-mail system in a window, along with icons for a variety of other applications and data. Grove was excited, enthusiastic. Now he knows from experience why we need the next few orders of magnitude of power increases: In order to have voice and video instead of text in our e-mail, in order to process image, in order to compress and decompress megabytes of data in real-time. As our tools get better, we'll want to share more and more information across networks, leading to the need for more processing power, more storage, higher bandwidth - in short, more hardware of every kind. Someday we'll have multimedia creation tools, video e-mail, and possibly animated representations of ourselves. (Do we really want them?)

And it leads to another problem (unless we're all using 986es with the same software): How do we make all this stuff look the same on disparate platforms? John Warnock of Adobe Systems will tell us his answer -- which will work wonderfully if enough people adopt it, just like PostScript.

The cost of change - value-subtracted

But all this magic means little if users can't use it. Grove has an assistant who spends at least half his time keeping Grovels system working (shades of Steve Jobs' promise of a mother in every box"). Wort Rosenthal's company, Corporate Software, offers a Windows-upgrade service that costs hundreds of dollars per user: You do the first few hundred users in a large corporation," he says, "and then you let internal technology transfer take over." Mark Tebbe's Lante Corporation makes a substantial sum by installing Notes systems. How can these products be made easier to use? And how can they be sold? Is such groupware really just mainframe applications in disguise?

Rosenthal and Tebbe have fundamentally the same role at the Forum - to talk about support and implementation, the role of services and all the system integration tasks that still aren't automated. In short, they're here to keep the vendors honest.

Lunch: Wiring the world from the bottom up

Ken Oshman, a co-founder of Rolm and more recently of Echelon, will talk about the challenge of trying to establish a standard piece by piece with LonWorks. LonWorks is a low-cost networking system with modules that can fit into common household appliances, office equipment and factory machines.

The principle is that you don't need a lot of intelligence in a single place or high-bandwidth communications in order to build an intelligent self-organizing system with high-level distributed intelligence. (Think of the effective group coordination you can get using low-level e-mail messages.) Aside from the technology and philosophy behind Echelon, he will discuss the tribulations of dealing with what Philippe Kahn calls standards comedies.