The first drum memory, at UCB in 1948, held just 800 bits per square inch. The drum was 2' long by 8" in diameter, holding 10K 10-bit words. IBM's RAMAC in 1957 stored 5MB on 50 24" disks (made by pouring iron oxide paint from a Dixie cup onto a spinning platter). Now you can get 30GB disk drives, and by 2001 we can expect 20Gb per square inch. Etched-grain laboratory systems may even reach 100Gb/sq. in. IBM Fellow Dave Thompson says it may someday be possible to develop a "memory prosthesis" or "prompting diary" that records everything you see and hear, then sifts through to extract and index everything you might want to remember. [Janet Rae-Dupree, SJM, 21Dec98, 1E.]

IBM has announced a chip capable of managing more than 65K simultaneous network connections, for variable-bandwidth corporate communication networks. [Computer Reseller News, 22Dec98. Edupage.]

IBM is publishing source code for a new email program, Secure Mailer. "This is IBM's present to the Internet. These are core pieces of software, and we're going beyond trying to make money off of them, to the idea that by freely sharing them it will make the world a better place." [NYT, 14Dec98. Edupage.]

Moore's Law -- that computer performance will double every 18 months or so -- was partly based on the ever-increasing number of scientists working on hardware development. His anticipated recruitment-of-effort levels have now been wildly exceeded. As cheap PCs open new markets in the US and worldwide, computing is becoming a core driver of the world's economy. Not just initial sales are involved; there are also peripheral and follow-on sales. Financing for all aspects of PC development is now essentially unlimited. Intel's chairman Andy Grove has said that he's worried about hardware getting ahead of software. "What if we build something really terrific and there is no software to allow the customer access to all that new power? Nothing goes stale faster than new technology sitting on the shelf. That is my greatest nightmare." He thinks Intel should have tripled its support for application software (other than operating systems). Even now, much of the Pentium II's power -- and much of Windows NT's 45M lines of code -- is being wasted on backward-compatibility emulation. [Mark R. Anderson , SNS, 15Sep98.]

Gipson Arnold is creating a "Futurist Chats & Message Boards" website, to list Internet-based forums that deal with futurist issues. . [, 18Dec98. David Joslin.]