The generation game
From the human perspective a ‘generation’ is usually taken as being a period of between 25 to 35 years, with the median being a 30-year long phase during which one age banding moves from maturity to senescence and inevitably gives way to the younger one that will succeed it. Thus, as we are five years into the new millennium (or merely four if you subscribe to a particularly pedantic definition of determining when a century actually begins) three or four human generations will pass before the dawn of the 22nd century.
However, that period will see the passing of rather more than three or four generations of new computer chips, operating systems and applications programs. Indeed there may well be several hundred such iterations but, nonetheless, they will all continue to evolve within the overarching superstructure of what is being called the ‘21st Century Network’.
Exactly what this network will consist of, what it will be able to do and how it will develop as the century progresses is the subject of much debate and will no doubt keep the next generation of futurologists as lucratively employed as pontificating about the 20th Century Network did their forefathers.
As yet we don’t know all that much about the 21st Century Network. It is after all very much a ‘work in progress’ and is developing before our eyes. What little we do know about the early form of it is that it will be packet-switched broadband, that it will be ‘converged’ and that it will be based on the truly ubiquitous and universal Internet Protocol standards.
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