Background

Nolan Bushnell is one of Silicon Valley's early computer pioneers and a technology visionary. He is perhaps best known for founding Atari and kicking off the video game industry. He also took a pizza parlor and turned it into Chuck E. Cheese's Pizza Time Theater, now a $280 million operation.

Bushnell has founded eighteen companies including Catalyst Technologies, which is an umbrella corporation described as an incubator that mass produces small businesses by providing seed capital, business plans, strategic development and management guidance for emerging Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs. His business direction and entrepreneurial skills have allowed him again and again to be on the forefront of the future.

Nolan's Thoughts on Internet Communication
E-mail keeps me in touch with people who are geographically remote. A few keystrokes every few days tend to link our lives in a much more powerful way than the phone ever did. A quick response, which only takes a few seconds to type and send, is easy (far easier than even a five-minute phone call, which is impossible and so who even tries?), and has over the years kept me up to speed in several fields that would have been lost without the electronic connection.

For people who look at E-mail as a replacement for more traditional communication, the lack of personal interaction is a real drawback. But for others, the E-connection creates an opportunity for communication where there had been none before, and in no way diminishes the joy of personal communication when there is opportunity for that.

To further explore these opportunities, let's get clear on the E-mail world before us:

• Local E-mail exists within a single company and ignores the rest of the world.
• Global E-mail has access to and from anyone connected by any means to the Internet.
• Query-based E-mail requires that one dial up to a server in order to check mail.
• Interrupt-based E-mail rings or beeps or barks to announce that mail has been received.
• Newsgroups and Bulletin Boards, allow one person to send to many others, or many people to send easily to one.
• Voice Mail can be like any of the above forms, but uses telephone wires.

All of these forms of Net communication have the power of non-real time response. Which is to say,you are granted the opportunity to think before you speak, and further, the opportunity to take your time speaking. The receiver will read your response when they have a moment to pay attention. This"duty-cycle of response" is a very different way to communicate, both immediate and patient, accommodating the user's wishes.

The revolution in communication that this new medium promises will not occur, however, until at least fifty percent of the business community has interrupt-based E-mail. It will allow the use of E-mail for business critical communications, rather than only for less-important or personal interactions.

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