In the microcosm, the interconnections come on individual chips, as ever smaller transistors crammed ever closer together work faster, cooler and cheaper, enhancing both the capability and the speed of the processor. The microcosm strewed some 100 million personal computers around the world and endowed individuals at workstations with the creative power of factory owners of the Industrial Age. Just as the microcosm generates exponential gains from increasing connections on chips, the telecosm generates exponential gains by increasing connections between chips, powerful microcomputers in themselves. These links between increasingly potent microchips will soon dominate the world of communications. This change is so radical that it resembles a mutation that creates a new species.
People communicate in domains of time and space entirely alien to the world of computers.
Most important, people can transmit or receive only a small stream of information at a time. Computers, on the other hand, can handle hundreds of millions or even billions of bits a second. They often need many millions of bits of bandwidth for a short time fractions of seconds. As industry shifts from a human scale of time and space to a computer scale, the systems and structures in existing telephone and broadcast networks become almost irrelevant. Driving this overwhelming force of change is the alchemy of interconnections, working in the telecosm with the same logic and feedback loops as connections in the microcosm.