May 6, 1990

SOMETIMES IN the electronics business, all of a sudden a lot of people are talking about the same thing at the same time, and they all say that “Something Really Big” is going to happen right away.

Such talk is often a consensual hallucination, a domino effect caused by people with wild imaginations bouncing off each other’s brain cells. For example, it’s been “The Year of the LAN (local-area network)” at least since 1983. And I remember InfoWorld publishing a cover story on optical disk storage in 1984. Both those technologies are just now beginning to gain popularity.

Although this same domino phenomenon may be true in the world of online services and electronic mail, there are growing numbers of personal computer visionaries who think local and global electronic networks are the next big “it.” ( I do, too.)

In almost every public appearance for the past year, for example, deposed Apple Product president Jean-Louis Gassee has stressed that he believes global telecommunications and databases are the two big growth industries for the next decade.

Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development and more recently of ON Technologies in Cambridge, has become an on-line fiend and now runs the “Software Design Conference” on the Sausalito-based WELL teleconferencing system and participates on MetaNET, a teleconference system run by the Metasystems Design Group in Arlington, Va.

And Steve Jobs of Next Computer makes it abundantly clear that the next wave in the computer business — he calls it “interpersonal computing” — is all about sophisticated electronic communication.
“The electronic organization adapts extremely fast to the tasks that need to be done by the organization, much faster than the people-based organization,” says Jobs, who also says Next’s e-mail system (which can send text, voice or graphics as part of a message) has cut the number of meetings in half and vastly improved the quality of decision-making. “(It’s) about the most exciting thing I’ve ever used a computer for.”

Of course, less famous people have been plugging away at interactive group communication for years. Academia, for example: The New Jersey Institute of Technology’s EIES teleconferencing system was built specifically for that purpose. And Metasystems Design Group and Camber-Roth (Troy, NY) co-market the popular Caucus teleconferencing system used in many corporations, universities and public and non-profit groups all around the world.

The benefits of group communications they’ve all passionately believed in for years is the subject of a four-day conference that’s coming up in San Francisco Wednesday through Saturday, May 23 to May 26. It’s sponsored by the Electronic Networking Association (ENA), a group founded in 1985 by pioneers in computer conferencing with an emphasis on interactive group communications.

The theme for this Fifth International Conference is “Collaboration in the Global ’90s,” and may boost the discussion of global teleconferencing to a new level — focusing on not only the technology, but also on the human systems, impact on organizations, and the global impact on economy, politics and the planet.

The program sounds great — conference coordinator Margaret Chambers says that a whopping 225 people are already committed to make presentations during the four-day marathon.

Douglas Englebart, father of almost everything important in the computer industry today (among them the electronic mouse, multiple-window screens, hypertext, integrated help systems, full-scale electronic mail systems and shared-screen teleconferencing), will attend a film presentation on Wednesday night about his “Augmented Knowledge Work Communities,” and will talk about his ideas.

Many of the 43 separate programs sound fascinating: “Tapping the External Information Resource,” led by Odd de Presno, a Norwegian author and “modem globetrotter”; “Telecommuting: the Promise Unfulfilled,” led by Charles Grantham, author of “Socializing the Human-Computer Environment”; “Government Communications in the Information Age,” with Wanda Carter of Hewlett-Packard and Ken Phillips of the city of Santa Monica, which has pioneered a free, city-wide Caucus-based public network.

There’s too much more to list here. For my money, the whole thing sounds like great gray-matter stretching, and should be of interest to anyone who wants to get a grip on the future. Call Chambers at (415) 582-5830 for information.