schatz@bambi.UUCP (Bruce R. Schatz) (02/02/85)
WANTED: hackers interested in making the WorldNet a reality I am running a project called "Telesophy" here at Bell Communications Research. Bellcore is the central research organization for the consortium of local telephone companies: it is analogous to the old Bell Labs before the AT&T divestiture. Everyone here believes that the telephone network of the near future will use fiber optics to obtain end-to-end speeds of gigabits/second rather than the current kilobits. Laying all this new cable has almost become economic so it will begin to be laid as soon as someone demonstrates an effective service which requires all that bandwidth. The answer I am investigating is information browsing. This is finding what you want by rapid scanning through large amounts of vaguely specified material. Technology in engineering workstations and fiber networks will make it possible to retrieve information in a style more similar to wandering through a library than querying an online bibliographic database. Such a system is an environment to support "telesophy", wisdom at a distance. It tries to make obtaining wisdom transparent just as telephony tries to make obtaining sound transparent. In computing terms, the system is an operating environment which supports the navigation and formation of an information space, a logical graph containing pointers to all the world's data with transparent caching across the fast network and uniform manipulation using a typed object schemata. The environment could thus support "WorldNet" browsing: knowledge at your fingertips -- AnyThing AnyWhere . The current activity of the project is to build a real browsing system on commercially available engineering workstations (Apollo DN320s). Hopefully this will enable usage experience with more than a handful of people living in a "transparent" information community, which facilitates locating and generating things in an information space. On-going activity is also proceeding to construct prototypes of end-to-end systems with throughput in the hundred megabit/second range. I am seeking experienced software systems people who enjoy implementing research prototypes in small team efforts. Bellcore is a consulting company with direct impact on the telephone network but minimal development involvement; the research area (some 400 technical people) is large and well funded. The main research center is in small-town New Jersey, surrounded by a large park yet only 30 miles west of New York City. The ideal candidate would be a programming environment hacker who is also an information junkie. Interested parties please contact me at the following addresses. A long paper describing the philosophical and technological basis behind Telesophy is also available. Bruce Schatz physical: Bell Communications Research Room 2A275 435 South Street Morristown, New Jersey 07960 phone: (201) 829-4744 USENET: bellcore!bambi!schatz ARPAnet: bellcore!bambi!schatz@BERKELEY