Jun
28
2005

quote of the day: looking ahead

A recent edition NPR’s On the Media program featured a quote from President Lyndon Johnson’s 1967 speech announcing the creation of the Publication for Public Broadcasting. LBJ’s “vision” for the future seems eerily prophetic.

So I think we must consider new ways to build a great network for knowledge — not just a broadcast system, but one that employs every means of sending and storing information that the individual can use.

Think of the lives that this would change:

  • The student in a small college could tap the resources of a great university…
  • The country doctor getting help from a distant laboratory or a teaching hospital;
  • A scholar in Atlanta might draw instantly on a library in New York;
  • A famous teacher could reach with ideas and inspirations into some far-off classroom, so that no child need be neglected.

Eventually, I think this electronic knowledge bank could be as valuable as the Federal Reserve Bank.

And such a system could involve other nations, too — it could involve them in a partnership to share knowledge and to thus enrich all mankind.

A wild and visionary idea? Not at all. Yesterday’s strangest dreams are today’s headlines and change is getting swifter every moment.

I have already asked my advisers to begin to explore the possibility of a network for knowledge — and then to draw up a suggested blueprint for it.

ARPANET, the U.S. military-sponsored precursor to the Internet, wouldn’t come online until 1969, two years later.

Posted at 4:25 PM in culture, quotable, technology, television

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