The Road Ahead - CD-vel [antikvár]

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION I work in the software industry, where change is the norm. A popular software title, whether it's an electronic encyclopedia, a word processor, or an on-line banking system, gets upgraded every year or two with major new features and countless refinements. We listen to customer feedback and study new technology opportunities to determine the improvements to make. For this new edition of The Road Ahead, 1 took the same approach. I made quite a number of changes, reviewing every paragraph and updating facts, but the biggest change is that the book, like Microsoft itself, now makes the Internet its central focus. The exploding popularity of the Internet is the starting point for most of the new material in this edition— including the total overhaul of chapters 5, 7, 9, and 11 and the afterword. In the first edition, I said that the connection of personal computers and other information appliances would create a communications revolution. I'm surprised by how quickly it's happening and by the way it's happening. Although I used the early Internet as a student in the 1970s, I didn't expect then that the Internet's protocols would become the standard for a network everybody would be talking about twenty years later.