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Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 15:07:26 GMTServer: NCSA/1.4.2Content-type: text/htmlLast-modified: Mon, 19 Feb 1996 21:10:29 GMTContent-length: 16764<html><title>Vice President Al Gore's ENIAC Anniversary Speech</title></head><body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000070" link="#000070" vlink="#000070"><center><h2>The Technology Challenge: How Can America Spark Private Innovation?</h2><h3>Vice President Al Gore</h3><h4>University of Pennsylvania<br>Philadelphia, PA<br>February 14, 1996</h4></center> This week, I am delivering three speeches about America's technologychallenges. On Monday, in Baltimore, I spoke to a collection of scientists,and asked: What is the role of science in American society? Yesterday, inVirginia, I asked: How must we update our notions of self-government to bringthem into harmony with the Information Age?<p> And today, Valentines Day, here on the glorious Penn campus, I willcomplete this technology trilogy, and ask: How do we spark the innovationthat creates jobs, builds businesses, and lifts lives?<p> To answer that question, I'll draw on a time-worn technique of yourmost annoying professors. I'll answer this question with another question.<p> Here it is: How did this happen? (Vice President displaysValentine's card)<p> Now, don't laugh. I'm going to give this to my wife Tipper whenI getback to Washington. <p> But it's special for another reason, too. Later this morning, I willwalk across campus to the Moore Building and turn the key on the ElectronicNumerical Integrator And Computer -- the ENIAC, the world's firstprogrammable computer, which is celebrating its 50th birthday.<p> That computer -- which stood ten feet tall, stretched 80 feetwide, and tipped the scales at 30 tons -- contains about as much computingpower as myValentine's Day card.<p> You know that powerful parallel computer that's playing chessagainst Gary Kasparov about 20 blocks from here? It can evaluate 40,000 chessmoves in the same time it took ENIAC to add two numbers. Anybody here havea laptopcomputer? Your computer has more power than the combined power of all thecomputers in the world 50 years ago.<p> So again the question: How did this happen? How did the power thatonce spanned an entire room migrate to this tiny card you can buy for a fewdollars at the stationery store?<p> There are several answers. The most important one perhaps is thatwe've got a lot of smart people in this country -- a lot of people like theones who've graduated from Penn. They've sweated long nights in thelaboratory -- repeating experiments, testing assumptions, collecting data -- andeventually they opened breathtaking avenues of possibility.<p> And these software writers and computer engineers joined up with themarketers and financiers to create real products that have made adifference in people's lives. Together, this duo propelled ideas out of thebasementcomputer lab and into the living rooms and offices of America.<p> But there's another explanation for this extraordinary development --this explosion of computing power and its migration to all corners of ourlife.<p> It's an explanation that may surprise you . . . an explanationnot even computer science professors comprehend . . . an explanation someof youmight never have heard before.<p>Bruce Springsteen.<p> Remember that song, "Dancin' in the Dark"? There are lines in thatsong that contain part of the answer to the puzzle of this card. Thelines go like this: "You can't start a fire . . . You can't start a firewithout aspark."<p> A key explanation for this Valentine's Day Card, for my coolwristwatch, for your red-hot laptops is that the federal government providedthe initial spark that eventually flickered into these extraordinaryproducts.<p> Back in 1943, the federal government provided a small amount of moneyto some of Penn's best engineers so they could develop an electronic machinethat could perform a rather narrow task: calculating firing tables forartillery weapons. That was the birth of the ENIAC.<p> After the ENIAC was built, it was put to use performing millions ofdiscrete calculations that were part of top-secret research on the hydrogenbomb. The ENIAC did that well, but before long the war ended.<p> At the time, there were some people who thought that the ENIAC andother computers could be used for other things -- maybe even for business.<p> The chairman of IBM, Thomas Watson, gushed: "I think there is a worldmarket for maybe five computers."<p> Popular Mechanics, in a 1949 issue dedicated to the inexorablemarch of scientific progress, made an ever bolder prediction: "Computers in thefuture," the magazine said, "may weigh no more than 1.5 tons."<p> And so it went. Talented people gradually improved on what the ENIACbegan. Computers got smaller, faster, smarter. And slowly but surely, fiftyyears later, I can display this card on a campus where a group ofundergraduates have etched the ENIAC's instructions on a tiny sliver ofsilicon.<p> In the early days of the ENIAC, nobody knew where it would all lead.But these pioneers -- and this nation -- were committed to an idea thattranscended any single destination: knowledge matters for its own sake;pursuing knowledge is something that America must do.<p> They heard the music, even if they didn't know the lyrics. You can'tstart a fire. You can't start a fire without a spark.<p> It's a similar tale with the Internet. Look at the cover of thisweek's Time Magazine. "The Golden Geeks. They invent. They startcompanies. And the stock market has made them instanaires."<p> Now, the Internet "instanaires" got where they are mainly throughtalent and tenacity. But it's unlikely they could have set the world ablazehad government not provided the initial spark.<p> In 1969, the federal government -- through the Defense Department'sAdvanced Research Project Agency -- created something called ARPANET. ThePentagon's goal was to develop a computer network that would allow militaryscientists and engineers to share expensive computers -- and to do it on anetwork that could withstand a nuclear attack. E-mail was a quirky -- buteventually useful -- afterthought.<p> Over the next decade, computer scientists at universities and federallabs began connecting to the ARPANET. A few thousand more people began usingthis new tool, but to the larger population it remained unknown.<p> Then in 1986, the National Science Foundation -- again, an agency ofthe federal government -- began what was called the NSFNET to expand theARPANET to include not simply computer nerds, but all researchers atAmerican universities. That led to the National Research and EducationNetwork, orNREN, which I helped get off the ground. And that eventually led to theInternet -- the organic network of networks that today is bursting with newusers,creating entirely new industries, and reshaping how we work and how wecommunicate.<p> The ARPANET creators could not have predicted what would happen totheir brainchild. But, as always, they heard the music -- and now we allknow the lyrics. You can't start a fire. You can't start a fire without aspark.<p> One more example. Time's poster boy is Marc Andreesen, a topofficial at Netscape. He's 24 years old. He's worth about $130 milliondollars. Notbad. That's roughly $14,000 for every day he's been alive.<p> Marc got his start just a few years ago as part of the team thatdeveloped Mosaic, the first sophisticated browser for the World WideWeb -- and the breakthrough application that made the Web accessible toordinary computer users.<p> Marc performed his work on Mosaic at the National Center forSupercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, a supercomputingcenter funded by . . . yes, the National Science Foundation.⌨️ 快捷键说明
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