Lecture Outline
Digital Technologies
Professor John M. McCann
Fuqua School of Business
Duke University
Last update: March 22 1996
This lecture focuses on the key trends described in my Digital Technology CyberTrends Web document. A brief outline is shown below, with links to sections of the CyberTrends documents as well as related Web sites.
- People are getting very rich while others are losing their jobs.
- It appears to be the best of times and the worst of times, as Charles Dickens described in A Tale of Two Cities (if you have a sound card, you can hear James Mason reading the book.)
- This state of affairs is being driven by digital technologies, primarily by the microprocessor and fiber optics.
- As microprocessors get more powerful, magnetic disk drives show dramatic increases in capacity and declining prices.
- Removable media, such as the ZIP drive, dramatically increase storage capacity.
- The Digital Video Disk will create an entirely new storage world, offering dozens of gigabytes of storage.
- New technologies have enabled digital cameras, including the Casio QV-10. A QV-10 was used to take pictures at the FSB faculty and staff holiday party.
- One key result of fiber optic and related technologies will be the plummeting price of bandwidth.
- Cable modems are likely to be the first breakthrough in bringing large bandwidth into the home through the efforts of companies such as @HOME. Durham will be one of the first towns that get this new service via Durham Cablevision, a division of Time Warner. Our facilties will likely be similar to Time Warner's Fat Pipe project.
- The ultimate communication environment will arrive with the all-optical network.
- We will likely see a reversal , a move from today's situation of scarce bandwith to a world of plentiful bandwidth.