A world wide combination of fiber optic cable and satellite receivers in a future time when homes and offices around the world will be linked by highways of electronic information that can be traversed interactively both to and from a connected user. Technologies are coming to a head and plans are being laid to bring the digital information highways to Main Street USA and elsewhere in the world. In homes and offices, a single piece of interactive TV digital television equipment (let's call it the
PCTV computer/television superhighways terminal) will combine what are now television sets, telephones, stereos, videotape players, videodisc players, compact disc players, and computers. The PCTV will be networked to hundreds of millions of "servers" ranging from the computer files of individuals to the systems of computer files that contain
virtually all the movies ever made, all the contents of daily newspapers, all the "television" shows ever recorded, all the cataloged products and services available from vendors, all public documents of governments, all the contents of libraries, all instructional and training courses on most anything known in the world, and so on to limits beyond our present imaginations. Even before the information superhighways come to town via digital satellites,
Barcroft (1993) , telephone fiber optics, and cable digital TV, technology see Victor (1993b) is presently in place to make vast amounts of digitized financial information publicly available in hypermedia structures. The hardware for a fiber optic superhighway across the United States made great progress when AT&T Corporation announced that "Sonet" service is operational initially between 200 cities. In 1994, Macromedia teamed up with Microware Systems Corporation in Des Moines, Iowa, to extend the Director software into PC and Mac utilities for authoring interactive network television titles. (See also
Intercast ,
Webcasting ,
PCTV ,
Video server ,
PPV ,
Set-top box ,
Sonet ,
Internet , and
SLIP )
A popular buzzword to describe the Internet, bulletin board services, online services, and other services that enable people to obtain information from telecommunications networks. In the U.S., there is currently a national debate about how to shape and control these avenues of information. Many people believe that the information highway should be designed and regulated by government, just like conventional highway systems. Others argue that government should adopt a more laissez faire attitude. Nearly everyone agrees that accessing the information highway is going to be a normal part of everyday life in the near future.
