The Evolving Roles of Computing and Communications (NOT KNOWN IF TALK GIVEN BECAUSE AUTHOR HAS LEFT AT&T)

Most ofus in the technology business have a certain mind-set relative to sommunication and computing -- do any processing, whatever theamount, to avoid communications. It is as if the computer sees the outside world only darkly through a drinking straw. Yet there are paradoxes. Why can we sen gigabits per second on a fiber from city to city, but only tens of megabits for the few centimetersfrom board to board on the backplane of a computer? The communications engineersare planning a new infrastructure that will facilitate high speed networkingbetween computers. How will this change the balance between processing and communications? Conceivably, bandwidth will be cheap and plentiful,but the speed oflight is immutable, and latency will be a problem only overcome by clever processing strtagies. Such may be the world ofthe future.