The world may stop, but e-mail will go on. Now of course the emphasis is on faster, faster. Futurist Alvin Toffler once wrote that the new competition in the world would not take place between the East and the West or the north and the south - but between the fast and the slow. In 1997, some 300,000 people used high speed access such as cable modem, ISDN or DSL to get online, while the rest used modems connected to standard telephone lines. Connection speeds are up to 100 times faster than conventional 56K lines.
Pictures come whizzing through faster, messages fly.
There is truth in all this techno-prediction, and the Net has already changed many of our lives. The hardware is there. But it also seems like few prognosticators are looking at the bottleneck, the flaw in the slaw, the dullest crayon in the box. Let me introduce you to Ron, - a symbol of his time. Perhaps I should back up.