ABSTRACT
IN 1997, Time magazine chose Andrew Steven Grove, chairman and CEO of Intel, as the Man of the Year (Isaacson, 1997) because he was “the person most responsible for the amazing growth in the power and innovative potential of microchips” (p. 48). The magazine claimed that the “Digital Revolution is now transforming the end of this century the way the Industrial Revolution transformed the end of the last one” (p. 48). The microchip has caused the dawn of the Tera Era, when digital bits-per-second are measured in trillions (tera), rather than in millions (mega) or billions (giga). The global communication grid is going through “an explosive expansion in capacity and speed”—a “bandwidth boom”—(Erickson, 1998) resulting from projects such as FLAG, China-U.S. Cable Network, Sea-Me-We3, and Oxygen.1 By the turn of the century, a surge
of new communication technologies-digital subscriber lines, microwave (fixed wireless) links, broadband cellular (cellphone) networks, low-earth-orbit satellites, interactive cable, and multimedia satellites-added to the “bandwidth boom” (Whitmore & Erickson, 1999).
