Today we travel an evolutionary path leading away from personal computers and operating systems mainly supporting applications that generate printed pages, and we head toward a future filled with the smart tools needed to create a high-bandwidth, Net-centric, media-rich environment. At the end of the path, in a global computing space governed by Moore's Law, Metcalfe's Law, and the Bandwidth Scaling Law, location means nothing, and time means everything.

On November 14, 1994, Bill Gates gave the keynote address at Fall COMDEX. Describing his vision of the future, he painted a picture of the tremendous opportunities technology would bring each of us by the year 2005. Gates said,

“Today's CD-ROM and online services are wonderful examples of software that prepares us for the possibilities of the future. Imagine the best of both mediums combined and running on a high- bandwidth, high-speed network: high-capacity, shared storage that enables up-to-date, rich, multimedia content to be easily accessed by many people. And by 2005, there will be applications that relate to all aspects of our lives.”

Sun Microsystem's Starfire project drew together the talents of more than 100 engineers, designers, futurists, and film makers in an effort to both predict and guide the future of computing. The output of this effort was threefold:

1. Starfire, the Movie, showing a day in the life of a knowledge worker in the year 2004.

2. Starfire, the Book, better known as Tog on Software Design, which not only covers the film in intimate detail, but lays out several more equally thought-provoking scenarios, even if they were not enshrined in celluloid.

3. Starfire, the Paper, published in the Computer Human Interaction (CHI) 1994 Proceedings, outlining the rules followed in attempting to build a scientifically “legitimate” video prototype, as opposed to simply confabulating a fanciful, but non-implementable, vision.

Mary Lee Kennedy is director of the Knowledge Network Group at Microsoft. She is responsible for the enterprise information portal, the intranet portal strategy, information services, and the search and taxonomy services.

Cindy Hill, Manager of the SunLibrary, Sun Microsystems’s worldwide information resource, is responsible for providing information services, resources, and knowledge collaboration worldwide. Sun is a global enterprise comprised of over 36, 000 technical, business, and marketing folks. Cindy is a member of the Special Libraries Association and a candidate for position of President-Elect.

And with that we’ll go to the first of the two video clips.