| Abstract: | Changes over the past twenty-five years in information and communication technology (ICT) are beginning to provide us with a clearer picture of the technical platform that will influence the shape of urban and industrial development into the 21st century. During this period we have experienced a number of key paradigm shifts in computing: from 1960s batch systems to 1970s time sharing systems to 1980s desktop systems (Newton et al. 1988). At the same time, but somewhat independently, communications were evolving from the slow speed analogue public switched telephone network which provided a measure of computer-to-computer interaction (via modems) to the newly emerging high speed broadband digital networks, networks which will provide a truly vast array of value added products and services (discussed more fully in Cavill and Fidler' paper). The dramatic price-performance improvements in these technologies and the synergy which now exists between computers and communications provides us in the 1990s with the core information infrastructure of the future: computers and the networks that interconnect them (Newton etal. 1991). |
