  All information about physical objects including humans, buildings,
processes, and organizations will be online. This trend is both desirable and
inevitable. Cyberspace will provide the basis for wonderful new ways to inform,
entertain, and educate people. The information and the corresponding systems
will streamline commerce, but will also provide new levels of personal service,
health care, and automation. The most significant benefit will be a
breakthrough in our ability to remotely communicate with one another using all
our senses.
  The ACM and the transistor were born in 1947. At that time the stored program
computer was a revolutionary idea and the transistor was just a curiosity. Both
ideas evolved rapidly. By the mid 1960s integrated circuits appeared --
allowing mass fabrication of transistors on silicon substrates. This allowed
low-cost mass-produced computers. These technologies enabled extraordinary
increases in processing speed and memory coupled with extraordinary price
declines.
  The only form of processing and memory more easily, cheaply, and rapidly
fabricated is the human brain. Peter Cohrane (1996) estimates the brain to have
a processing power of around 1000 million-million operations per second, (one
Petaops) and a memory of 10 Terabytes. If current trends continue, computers
could have these capabilities by 2047. Such computers could be 'on body'
personal assistants able to recall everything one reads, hears, and sees.
