October 8, 1989

PARIS — On Wednesday, hundreds of Europeans celebrated the opening of a new Infomart, the first in Europe, at the CNIT/La Defense, a growing commerce and technology center on the western edge of Paris. What the French are doing with their new high-tech mall is cause for the U.S. to cast an eye across the Atlantic as Europe prepares for the European Economic Community pact in 1992.

Wednesday’s Infomart opening even drew Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, equipped with personal translator, to a “grand debate” about what the French call “informatique,” or information technology, in the year 2000.

Students from French polytechnic and telecommunications schools were given center stage with Gates, but the evening’s future-gazing included comments from more than a dozen major figures in French information technology, including Paul Quiles, Minister of the PTT, France’s nationalized telecom company; Edith Cresson, Minister of European Affairs; and Jean-Jacques Duby, group director of science and technology for IBM Europe.

Christian Pellerin, who bought the CNIT and restored it as a technology center despite rampant negative public opinion (“Everybody said he was mad,” said one French journalist), says the opening attracted big names because of what it represents for France. “These people understand that new technology is the solution for new, strong economic development,” he said. “It’s a place where you can see new things every day.”

(France has a way to go, however; only 12 percent of all software used in France is French. And Duby from IBM Europe said, in effect, that nothing new has been invented in computer technology since the ’60s. Someone from Apple France ought to send him a Macintosh…)

Pellerin modeled the Paris Infomart after the one in Dallas, but with one big difference: the technology is not just sitting by itself, it’s integrated into a suite of other facilities, including an exhibition hall (the site of Apple Expo this year), convention center, hotel, stores, and an array of technology showcases ranging from the world-renowned French Telecom to Apple Computer to IBM. Today it’s filled to capacity with more than 270 high-tech companies and industry groups.

Infomart is also at the center of another big movement. At this moment, it is one of three test sites in Europe for what the French call “Numeris,” which we know in the States as ISDN, or the Integrated Services Digital Network.

What most people hear about ISDN is a single capability that’s being touted (wrong-headedly) by AT&T: the calling party identification, or “who’s-calling-me?” feature that displays the number of an incoming call on a special (expensive) telephone.

But a digital telecommunications network that allows voice and data to travel simultaneously on one phone line has far more possibilities than such gadgetry — especially for Europe, whose vast array of telecom standards makes it difficult for Europeans to work across borders.

The continent’s movement toward ISDN hasn’t gone unnoticed stateside. “You’re lucky to be in Europe,” Jean-Louis Gassee, president of Apple Products, said to more than 600 Macintosh developers during the recent Apple European Developers Conference. “The U.S. is becoming a third world country compared to Europe and Japan in data networks.”

Gassee, who talks up ISDN every chance he has, says that after longtime Apple executive Del Yocam, leaves the company at the end of November, he’ll be taking Yocam’s place on the board of the American Electronics Association, and intends to make ISDN a pet project.

He calls ISDN “the great network equalizer,” another way of saying “no borders” — a slogan of sorts for the EEC and 1992.

Things were not nearly so hopeful on Oct. 1, 1946, during the post-war Peace Conference, when the New Yorker magazine printed one of Janet Flanner’s celebrated “Letters from Paris.” Flanner wrote:

“… The new balance of power in Europe is now being balanced by a couple of powers that are not European — Russia and the United States,” she wrote. “… After 2000 years of Europe’s dominating civilization, a nervous shiver runs down the spine of any thoughtful American at the Peace Conference when he realizes that the 21 nations’ voices are actually silent, that the Big Four’s voices are not even a strong and constant quartet, and that the Big Three’s voices are not always a powerful trio, because what counts is only the voices of the Big Two, the voices of the East and the West. The world seems to have lost two points on its compass. The earth’s surface is changing. Europe is contracting; the USSR and USA areas of influence are expanding.

In 1946, not Janet Flanner nor anyone of her generation likely imagined that Japan would become the great economic power it is today, or that computer technology might be the force to drive Europe back into the economic limelight. Today Europe still has a long road before it returns to its status as a “dominating civilization,’ if indeed it can. But information technology is almost certainly the fire that will begin to melt its nearly half-century glacier of isolation.