The vision of a convergent information industry is simple and unprecedented: the creation of a national—eventually global—electronic communications network that connects people and organizations to everyone else. Every type of electronic communication imaginable—electronic banking, education, shopping, taxpaying, chatting, game playing, videoconferencing, movie ordering, medical diagnosing (as well as others yet unimagined)—will traverse this network. Information from the network will be accessible through a variety of information-handling devices, such as PCs, interactive TVs, telephones, or future devices that combine the attributes of all three, as well as through wireless devices such as pagers, wireless phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and future broadband devices.

Digital books will allow information to be unleashed from libraries around the world, to flow as easily as conversations flow today. Digital cameras allow images to be stored on Web sites and accessed by anyone with an Internet connection. Software will enable the search and retrieval of any piece of information from anywhere. Instant access to virtually any information from any place will profoundly change the way we work, play, and live.

In 1965, Intel Chairman Gordon Moore postulated the famous and widely accepted Moore's Law that the price performance of chip-based technology doubles every eighteen months. Robert Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, postulated an equally important rule that the power of a network increases by the square of the number of computers attached to it.