This is not simply a rhetorical question, particularly in the middle of The Computer Revolution, so let’s try to first consider the kinds of things that may live in your computer, and thus in anyone else’s.
And thus in anyone else’s….
There’s the key to the whole situation.
Before computers there was ONLY ONE THING everyone all over the world could have all they wanted of….Don’t know?
Read on to find out.
If Everyone Could Have Everything
The first time the first permanent file was place in a computer intentionally for everyone to download to see for the rest of history was one of those turning point moments you read about in history books, watch on that cable History Channel, and, in general, turn the whole world upside down.
However, not everyone LIKES to see the whole world and their lordship over it turned upside down.
Just spend the shortest time researching about how the natural gas companies reacted to the light bulb and it might give you a whole new slant on the term:
Reactionary
Of course, when that first file was presented for that new computerized world to download, no one really paid much attention, since no one really knew what Internet even meant, or would mean.
It would be 20 more years, in 1991, before “Internet,” as a word, would ever grace some front pages or covers of any major media in the world. [Wall Street Journal front page of Oct. 29, 1991]
However, The Wall Street Journal did get the point the first electronic library in the world was making, that once you put a book on the Internet, everyone could do the downloading thing and have a copy.
Everyone Could Have Everything
At least in terms of virtual world electronic books.
Today you can’t really buy a new computer that should not be able to hold millions of copies of that early, primitive, small document, only about 5 kilobytes, in the form of The U.S. Declaration of Independence.
Thus:
- A 5 megabyte storage unit could hold 1,000 copies
- A 5 gigabyte storage unit could hold 1,000,000 copies
- A 5 terabyte storage unit could hold 1,000,000,000 of The Declaration of Independence.
An interesting point for a project that had attempted to declare the independence of the reading worlds from the worlds of the olde boye networkes of publishing.
By the way the only thing before that that everyone in the world could have all of that they wanted…air.
Everyone Could Have Everything?
Yes, once anyone cared enough to put something in that new frontier called Cyberspace, a frontier that is now so far in the past that hardly anyone even uses a term as archaic as Cyberspace any more, everyone else in an infinity of Cyberspace could have a copy, or copies in perpetuity, all they wanted of everything there.
That’s the whole point of Cyberspace….
Everyone can have everything….
Well…up to a point….
And that point was like what Bill Gates did on the day when he decided that something that had been free from day one of Cyberspace, the BASIC programming language, should no longer be free, but people should have to do what they did in the material world, pay for it.
…And Thus Microsoft Was Born…
Who would have thought that the world’s richest person would start by selling refrigerators to Eskimos?
But that’s what he did, he started by selling BASIC to a world in which it had always been free.
He changed it just enough to get a copyright, and then made sure it was included with every IBM computer, for which he had the contract to supply operating systems, and the BASIC language to write programs with.
Bill Gates had taken the first step to richest person.
But it only worked if we all could NOT have everything as had been the original model of Cyberspace.
Back To Reality…
The reality of 2007 will include:
- Terabyte Drives
- 50% Saturation Levels of Worldwide Cell Phone Markets
and as a result
A greater cell phone presence that you’ve ever seen:
- iPhones
- eNVs
- Chocolates of All Varieties
- More Cell Phones That Do WiFi, browsing, etc.
It is the start of the pocket gizmo that does it all.
And there will be millions of these on the streets.
All in 2007…which is already a month old….
What If Everyone Could Make Everything?
We are now moving from computers in the virtual worlds to computers in the real world:
2007 Will Also Include Replicators at Sears….
Yes, you can go down to Sears and buy what people will call the first Replicator for the average person.
It will cost you twice as much as your computer, and a terabyte to go with it, but it will make solid objects from programs you can download from the Internet, such programs will obviously be available in commercial and free versions and will replace many of the tools found in basement workshops today.
However, by 2008 there will be so much competition for Replicators, open source and otherwise, that prices on these will plummet as fast as all other computer stuff and by 2010 the world will have to deal with both; the world in which more than half the potential cell phone buyers already have them, and the world in which stuff is being made by computers, actual solid stuff that is suitable for building houses, furniture, and all sorts of other things that you used to buy at stores.
What If Everyone Could Make Everything?
Every year Replicator Technology works with materials, processes, temperatures, etc., that were fictions just the year before, and prices continue to fall.
Some will say that $2,000 to $10,000 is too much price point inflation for today’s market.
People tend to forget that the average IBM-AT systems, only 22 years ago, cost about $10,000 in 1980’s money, which would be about double that today.
Perhaps we will find out sooner than you think.
The End
Those are my great predictions for the future of 2007, and here are their logical extensions.
2010
1.
Terabytes will become so commonplace that you will not be able to buy a computer with a much smaller drive in the years between 2010 and 2020.
This means you will never have to delete any files you might have today, unless you want a movie library.2.
There will be a HUGE boom in cell phones starting now, and lasting perhaps until 2010, then the markets would have to change or die off, just as they did during The Dot Com Bust, when the U.S. Internet market passed the point where half the potential markets were already on the Internet.
By the way, I told everyone I knew that these markets, the ones that were doubling every year or two, can NOT continue to double again once they pass 50%.
But no one listened to me….
Several of my friends lost major money in the crash.
I hope there is some way that telling people this same thing about the cell phone market will be able to stop the same kind of crash from happening.
But my friends tell me that no one will listen, again.
However, the next three years from 2007 to 2010 should be incredibly exciting as the cell phone market goes a similar path worldwide as U.S. Dot Com Boom did.
You will see more and more, wilder and wilder things a cell phone can do until they can do everything persons who design them can include.
This will happen because they will be competing for an ever shrinking market of new cell phone users and they will turn to trying to attract users of other brands a lot more than they are doing now, as 2010 to 2020 goes from half the world on cell phones to everyone who may ever want a cell phone being able to have one.3.
Combining #1 and #1 we get #3, Terabyte Telephones.
Yes, by 2020 you will see these gizmos with terabytes, not to mention RAMsticks with terabytes, and you could literally carry a million books on each such RAMstick.
Keychains of these could carry every word in libraries such as The Library of Congress, The British Library & any or all of the other major world libraries.
What Happens When We Can Carry Libraries On Keychains?
The first thing people will notice when comparing some pictures of life in 2020 versus 2010 is the lack of an assortment of backbreaking bookbags carried by student populations in schools, and doctors will stop having a crush of the medical problems caused by this.
It would be cute if The Third World adopted eBooks for schools sooner than The First World, just as they were adopting cell phones rather than stringing a telephone wire network of millions of miles at great expense.
Just as cell phone calls are half the price in a Third World country than in the U.S., so, too, will books be when they switch over to carrying their books home via RAMsticks instead of heavy bookbags.
The Obvious Differences, and the Not So Obvious
OK, we’ll see more and more people talking on cells so much that we no longer will be reminded of how much it looks like we’ve been invaded by crazies talking to an imaginary person.
We’ll also see more and more students without books of the old fashioned Gutenberg Press variety.
Students without weighty tomes, what a concept!
Students who don’t have to go to the library!
Another earthshaking concept!
Students who don’t have to pay huge book fees!
Another earthshaking concept!
Now for the Not So Obvious
Just as The Stationers Company lobbied for hundreds of years through two dozen reigns to stop the rampant use of The Gutenberg Press that shattered their monopolies on all sorts of writing and publishing, we have to see that this same sort of thing could happen again, as it has happened in all 5 previous Information Ages.
Thus we must expect new copyright laws to try to stop, if that is possible, this new technology, where we all could carry every book in The Library of Congress, and who knows how many other libraries.
What You May Not Realize
IT IS ALWAYS LEGAL TO COPY WHEN YOU CANNOT MAKE COPIES
The latest copyright laws are being specifically setup just to stop the Internet.
The previous set of copyright laws was specifically to stop the Xerox machine.
The ones before that were to stop electric presses and the ability to deliver books to everyone’s door at low enough prices that Sears could send their 768 pages of their new catalog to everyone in the U.S. For so many it was the very first book they ever owned.
And…it demonstrated that books COULD be made at so inexpensive prices that even including the price to go to the door of every home in America, Sears will still make a large profit on sending them out.
This terrified the publishing industry and the results were the U.S. Copyright Act of 1909.
This takes us back to the first U.S. extension of that new country’s copyright law in 1831, which was created specifically to stop the competition from the new high speed steam printing press patented in 1830. This was the shortest of all 5 Information Ages.
Obviously the First Information Age was created due to The Gutenberg Press and the power of The Stationers to finally outlaw the use of that press by anyone, other, of course, than themselves.
It’s kind of like killing the goose that lays the eggs of the golden variety…not quite killing it, but to just make sure none of those eggs hatch into geese for others to get golden eggs from.
Nonetheless, The Gutenberg Press was so powerful in an era when virtually no one could read, that it created, a while later, The Scientific Revolution, and in later years, The Industrial Revolution, neither of which are explainable without many Gutenberg Press benefits.
You see The Gutenberg Press was the very first example of mass production, with it’s compound use of leverage a few people could made as many books as hundreds of a population of monasteries and scriptora could make for the next century…and all the books were the same — no errors were introduced in each new copy.
However, an even greater effect was that books were to be made in larger quantities that The Catholic Church, and it’s never-to-be-sufficiently-damned inquisitions, were never again going to be able to burn all of them.
Thus, Martin Luther’s 95 Theses could not be burned to ashes, along with their author, as so many other books and authors were, and The Catholic Church should never again be the apparently infinite power it pretended.
There was one more even greater effect of Gutenberg’s, and it was one that few give him credit for…those moveable type pieces he made were the very first of a whole new world of “interchangeable parts.”
Add to that his advances in metallurgy to include the utilitarian aspects of more than pots and pans and an assortment of military weaponry or elite jewelry, and you have all the pieces required to arrive years, and years, and years later at The Industrial Revolution.
The shame of it is that most historians have the very short attention span of only one era, and thus cannot see the incredible continuum between Gutenberg and an Industrial Revolution that took place 300 years later with more additions to the concept of mass production and the various concepts of compound leverage, metals and interchangeable parts introduced by Gutenberg.
In Conclusion
Thus ends our little tale of what would happen if you all could have everything.
Would The Haves allow The Have Nots to catch up???
Or will they copyright and patent everything, just so YOU can’t have everything in a world in which it will be POSSIBLE TO HAVE EVERYTHING, ONLY IT IS ILLEGAL.
Will The Haves try to restrict the raw materials, and the electrical power, needed for Replicators?
One thing you can be sure of is that the battle for a level playing field that only just started with those topics covered by Thomas L. Friedman who started with “The Earth Is Flat” will soon become a war, possibly, even, a larger war in terms of capital expenditure on economic warfare than has ever been for the military.
— Michael Hart