INTERVIEW:
Question 1
Hewlett Packard is a pioneering company in Silicon Valley and the research labs have a key
role. Can you give us a short history of this corporate lab?
Answer
Hewlett Packard is about 56 years old. Hewlett Packard laboratories, the central research
organization, is 30 years old this year. The purpose of the laboratories is to try to
develop new innovations in technology that can help companies to be more successful in
their current business and to try to help new inventions which can create new businesses.
Question 2
Networking is still a core business for Hewlett Packard, so what are the latest important
improvements in fiber optics and transmitters that have come from your laboratory?
Answer
In the Hewlett Packard laboratories we work a great deal on many types of networking. We
were the inventors of the use of twisted telephone wires to do 10 million bits of
information per second, then we improved that to 100 million bits per second. Today we are
doing experiments on fiber optic networks which are many times faster than that. Several
billion bits of information per second exist on our experimental networks, and we think we
will use some of this technology to connect parts of our computers together. One day we
think that some of these components will be used in the fiber optic backbones which are
being built. We also work on wireless transmission, both optical and microwave, in order
to make it possible to connect more people to technology more easily and at lower cost.
Question 3
Are you working on ATM technology?
Answer
Yes, we are experimenting with ATM or asynchronous transfer mode, a very interesting type
of switching system in our Bristol, England laboratories, where we are looking both at the
use of ATM for long distance communications but also as one possible way of working on
local area networking.
Question 4
What do you think about the problem of the last mile? Will fiber optics arrive to the home
or will they be used only for the backbone?
Answer
I think will take a very long time for fiber optics to reach the last mile. We like to
think of it as the first mile because we think the miles ought to start with the customer
and not with the network. We are looking at some alternatives to that, working with some
of the telephone companies. And one of the interesting ones is to use very high frequency
microwave transmission for that first mile, so that there would be a wireless connection
to a hub for say 500 homes or for a hospital or for a school and from there on use the
fiber optic for the backbone, because while there are many advantages to fiber optics it
is extremely expensive and hard to install, and so we are looking for less expensive
alternatives at least for the next 5 to 10 years.
Question 5
What is the Smart Valley project and what are the results so far?
Answer
Smart Valley is an experiment using public and private information systems. It has been
surprisingly successful in that there are around 200 companies now collaborating in quite
a number of interesting ventures. Some are looking at commercial ventures, selling things
over the Internet connecting to their customers, a kind of an on-line shopping center.
Others are using it for getting at some very interesting kinds of information. For
example, we have a digital atlas, a set of maps, that are on-line, which are being by
companies such as the utility companies to locate where some of their facilities are.
There are some medical experiments taking place and a great many other kinds of
interesting experiments.
Question 6
Hewlett Packard is also working to improve tele-medicine and tele-surgery. What are the
latest technologies in these fields?
Answer
Tele-medicine is something we are very interested in. The trends today is to have people
not stay in hospital for nearly so long, to let them out of that environment where they
can get quite sick from all the infectious diseases and finish their treatment at home. So
we are looking at the development of some instruments that would be reliable enough that
people could use them after they have had serious surgery or after they have been treated
for cancer. We are also looking at a lot of new technologies to prevent people from having
to go into the hospital at all, to find out about diseases, for example genetic diseases,
before they occur so that we could treat them preventively. Among the technologies we are
looking at are new types of sensors that will look at the DNA molecules of a person and
try to determine what types of diseases they might have inherited or that they might be
sensitive to.
Question 7
Can you explain the Magellan project?
Answer
Magellan is a new video that we have made. It's intended to show the way engineers are
doing design and manufacturers and business managers might cooperate at many different
locations across the globe designing a product which requires a lot of teams to work
together on a very short time scale. We named it Magellan after the Portuguese navigator
who was the first one to circumnavigate the globe. We think that for many companies
business in the next century will be global and that they will have to pay attention to
working across great distances with people from many different enterprises. So Magellan
tries to show - using projections of technologies we have today, but which are not yet
ready for the kind of use that I've just mentioned, - how people might work together in
the year 2000 and the way in which manufacturing and engineering could be blended using a
mixture of virtual reality, Internet-style public networking, on-line video, predictive
engineering design, and many other techniques that will make the computer a more useful
and easier to use tool for people who are trying to cooperate with other people far away.
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