LIGHTNING CAN LOOK SLOW 

One hundred and fifty years ago the Pony Express had a booming business. Prior to the start of the legendary communications company (although at the time they didn't realize that's what they were) it was sometimes taking six months to get a letter from New York to San Francisco, due mainly to the long trip around the tip of South America. Even overland, via covered wagon took three months. And that was for the lucky ones that made it and didn't get knocked off in the Indian wars.

It appeared that the Pony Express had done everything right. Within 15 months they already had established the legend that still exists. They had the best horses (having paid the best price), the best riders (for the same reason) and their system was doing the impossible: moving mail from the Mississippi to the west coast in days, not months or years. In many ways, except for the equipment used, they were like some of today's rapidly growing communications companies. They had the best system of its kind anywhere.

Then Samuel Morse came out with the telegraph. In 90 days the Pony Express went bankrupt (no Chapter 11, in those days) for two million U.S. dollars, the largest corporate failure of the times.

Today, especially in Canada, with our out-dated tower of babel called the Canadian Radio & Television Communications Commission, an acronistic process moves slowly through the bureacratic maze. Two giants move their armies towards a battlefield that has already shown it's operating in another time and space. Bell Telephone and its allies are aching to get into the cable and entertainment business and Rogers Cable and their supporters are about to plead anything to establish a competitive phone service. Bell is equally convinced they must stop such an advance at once, and move into the cable field themselves, the quicker the better. Meanwhile the Communications Age unfolds according to plan. A plan that includes the ultimate law of order: chaos!

Known to only a few, a process is under development through the Advanced Technology Group of Apple Computer in Cupertino, California that would allow real time video, via decompression and transmission, to be transmitted over ordinary, copper twisted pair cables, (the same as leads into your house now). It has been the conventional belief, even by those in the phone industry, that real video could not be sent over ordinary phone lines because of the wide band required for television.

However many small advances in computer technology have given the home computer screen far better picture resolution than traditional TV screens. Also software programs using another Apple development known as HyperCard have permitted a deck of "cards" to flash rapidly on the screen; something like the old-style cartoon cards that you hand-flicked through to express motion. Only the HyperCard cards could be of high resolution. With film shot and projected at 24 frames a second, and video at 30 frames a second, this was not that hard a target to attain.

The future will bring SuperScan at 60 frames a second, the speed at which the eye perceives reality. Won't advertisers love that? Now what happens to the "clash of the titans" when a new technology is released that allows the old pipeline (phonelines) to carry more than previously believed possible. And because they have the software to make it possible, another player now holds the trump card?

How can it work? Say you have a four-inch square sponge. It won't fit into a three-inch pipe, right? But what if you could squeeze that sponge into a dot that was one-tenth of an inch in diameter -- and round! And when it popped out the other end of the pipe it sprang back to its original four-inch size! My computer holds that famous "Sports Illustrated" swimming-suit colour poster of Cheryl Tiegs. It is in compressed format to save storage space in the hard drive. When called up, the compressed picture expands and fills the screen. Really fills it. A battery of such pictures, with the flow stream commencing through phone lines, say one minute before the show appears on TV, could have subsequent picture flows having 60 seconds each to expand before having to appear in their respective places in the show. A computer/device called a genlock, plus a "frame grabber" enables moving anything on computer to television and visa versa. Ergo, motion pictures. Over the phone line!

Moral: Since economic death flew on swift wings 150 years ago, think how much quicker it could happen today!

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