Internet the Focus of Coming Technologies

Schmidt champions Java as model

By Don Dugdale

For some observers, the Internet may be the most hyped technology of the 1990s, but for Eric Schmidt the opposite is true. "The Internet is actually the new paradigm," he told an audience of his plenary session on 21st Century Technologies at UniForum '96. "The Internet is probably the thing that will guide as many business and personal issues as you will face, pretty much for the rest of your professional life," he said.

Schmidt, chief technology officer and corporate executive officer for Sun Microsystems, used that introduction to plunge into a description of how the so-called Internet revolution will dominate the rest of this decade. He used the second half of his talk to discuss Sun's Web-focused Java programming technology, virtually repeating the demo given by CEO Scott McNealy that morning.

In speaking of the impact brought about by the Internet, Schmidt declared, "A few years ago people thought the Internet was an interesting communications mechanism, but it's now become the platform for computing." Among the consequences, he listed these points:

• Internet service providers in the United States are trying to divide up the country's Internet service in much the same way that San Francisco's railroad tycoons divided up the United States in the nineteenth century.

• Unix will have a central role in the Internet's development, because of its strong ties to both open systems and the Net's underlying protocols.

• The Internet will almost certainly resist all attempts at pervasive censorship. "The Internet actually views censorship as a bug and routes around it," Schmidt said. "The Internet was designed to withstand nuclear attack. Do you think you can stop it?" he asked an amused audience.

  "The Internet is much bigger than people think," he added. "All of a sudden people are discovering that there are a lot of people out there in the world with a lot of diverse opinions, and they are all now accessible to you. Every country and every society is going to have to sit down and figure out how they want to react to that."

• The greatest standards battles of the near future will be fought on this ground. "In 1996 it's going to be a fight between Netscape and its friends and Microsoft and its power," he predicted. "You could make a credible argument that either one will be extraordinarily successful and perhaps both. This has become the lightning rod for our industry. These battles that are going to occur competitively will in many ways affect the way we all compute."

• Firewalls, proxy servers, cable modem technologies and "a model for trust" [secure systems] are among the areas where Internet-related needs should be served in the near future, Schmidt said. "It's now this incredible rush to solve all these different problems. In two or three years, as all these technologies play out, it's going to be very different for all of us."

• The HTML standards battles will evolve into a single ubiquitous standard with lots of extensions. "That ubiquitous standard is almost certainly being set by the volume leader today, Netscape," he said.

• Distribution of multimedia information to the home will be enabled by the coming of cable modems that connect to both television sets and home Ethernets.

Schmidt didn't exactly take us into the next century, but he made it clear that the last years of this one will be interesting.