The first in a short series of programmes on the Internet.
About the programme by Peter Day
It must be 15 years since I first went to see George Gilder, prophet of the Telecosm, at his farmhouse deep in the rolling Berkshire Hills in Massachusetts. In those days his daughter kept sheep, and their bells tinkled through the interview I did with him about the coming of the Internet.
It was particularly memorable because afterwards his wife Nini invited us to stay for supper, and on the menu were fiddlehead ferns, the asparagus-like tops of bracken which are only edible during a few short weeks of spring, when they are quite delicious.
This summer, with the ferns full-grown and out of season, I went back to see him again, because nearly everything that George Gilder has been predicting about communications is now in the process of coming true.
Boom in bandwidth
George Gilder has had many insights about many different things, but perhaps the most striking is about bandwidth.
He saw, maybe 20 years ago, that what Moore’s Law predicted about the way computer power on a silicon chip was doubling every two years was roughly paralleled by the way bandwidth was getting cheaper and more abundant at an even faster speed.
Put the two together - in this thing called the telecosm - and an extravagant networked world would emerge and transform the way we live.
Well, it’s been happening, and wherever you go in cyberspace, up will pop someone who will tell you that George Gilder is one of his or her prime inspirations.
Meanwhile, Mr Gilder himself has been having adventures.
Dot com disaster
During the dot com boom of the 1990s, he became a much followed newsletter writer, enthusing about starter companies who were going to benefit from all this convergence.
Shares in the companies he mentioned soared - the 'Gilder effect' it was called.
And he invested in his own recommendations, too.
At the height of the boom, George Gilder had a paper value of $200 million. And then it burst.
And his paper worth became negative equity - $10 million worth, he says. He is still trying to pay it off.
A memorable visit
But that in no way undermines George Gilder’s great perceptions about connectivity.
And if broadband connectivity had been universally available ten years earlier, then maybe the dot com bubble would not have burst quite as definitively as it did in 2000.
I have to report that the sheep, and the daughters, are now gone from home.
But it was another notable visit. After we left, the Gilders were going to his mother’s 90th birthday. She was celebrating by playing the piano, to accompany the cello of a neighbour, who happened to be Yo-Yo Ma.
Contributor:
George Gilder
Gilder Telecosm Forum, author of The Silicon Eye
