The Interactive Device for the Information Age I was just reading an article I published in the New Telecom Quarterly in 1996. The paper is worth reading in my opinion. It has to do with the government’s role in creating what was at that time called the National Information Infrastructure or as Al Gore called it, the Information Highway. At that time, most people thought that the interactive device in the home would be the TV. I was arguing that it would be the PC (which as not that obvious at the time). In fact, at Intel we had a slogan, “The PC is it”.

Well I think you will find that my prognosis was correct. The PC became the interactive device in the home and only now more than ten years later do we see any other forms of connected interactivity emerging. However, it will not be the PC that is IT in the next ten years. There will be no IT. Rather, we will see that the interactive device in the home will actually be the home. With more and more devices being connected to the net.