Farewell to the MICROCOSMOS.

In the world of business, things are changing so quickly that many people don't even have time to be confused. More correctly, such changes are taking place in the world of business communications. In today's world, business is communications! It's quicker-than-lightening transmission of data that businesses intending to stay in business need to know about and employ now, or at the least, very, very soon.

Writer Julie Stricker addresses this general topic in her article Internet2 that begins on page 18 and is followed by a directory of 16 Alaska-based Internet service providers. Not long ago, that list would have contained but two names. While getting a "whiff of pepperoni" via your computer may still be a stretch, Sticker nonetheless poses the proposition that what's coming will not likely be your "teenagers' Internet."

So what's coming? More to the point, what's going? What's going is the microcosmos--microchips--and their geometrically expanding world of microscopic transistors and silicon chips. Both of these gave birth to the $500 billion personal-computer revolution that has turned our world upside down (while both emptying and filling our pockets). What's coming is the broad bandwidth, oft' called revolution, of...