OPENING
GOOD MORNING!
In March 1987, the first Interop was held in Monterey, California. It was called the TCP/IP Interoperability Conference. CISCO was a participant as it has been in the eleven other Interop's since. Throughout its eight year life, keynote speakers have been representatives of great universities, leading research labs, software companies, major computer vendors and even a U.S. army general.
Today I am honored to be the first keynote speaker selected from a growing list of new companies large and small that provide the intelligent plumbing for the information highway. Many, like CISCO, have been long and consistent participants in Interop.
On behalf of all of them, partners and competitors, I thank the Conference management for giving us this honor and recognition.
In the Information Age, life-long learning is both an opportunity and a necessity. Information - or access to it - is the engine that drives much human activity.
The information highway of today - the information superhighway of tomorrow - eliminates the historic boundaries of time and place when it comes to access to information and education. In the networked world, the only barrier to entry is the capacity of one's own mind.
The global network thus both helped to create the information age and solve the global challenge of it.
Today I will speak about the history of the Internet - its early and continuing ties to universities worldwide - its status today - and its promise for life-long education in the future.
Many have said - if you want to see the future - go to a University. When it comes to networking and internetworking - clearly that was the case in the early 80's - clearly this is the case today.
Indeed, Cisco had its origin at a great university, Stanford. Our founders provided and operated the network and were challenged by the requirements of that educational environment.
Stanford University currently has an enrollment of approximately 12,000 students. Each student is assigned an account on the campus network and has access to the network via some 16,000 connections (i.e. PCs, workstations, etc.). The most popular application is email; Gopher and Mosaic are also top runners. About 9,000 students live on campus. Today, 5600 dorm rooms are connected to the Internet. Within the next three years, all on- campus resident facilities will be Internet connected.
Stanford estimates that 60% of its network traffic is intracampus while 40% goes outside the campus. Much of it - Email home.
Since February of this year, CISCO has shipped to Japan some 100 CISCO 7000s with ATM interface processors as that Country sets about building a national Internet. As you might expect, core to this new Internet are the universities. Eight of some 75 public and private Japanese universities on their Internet will have ATM campus backbones tied to their National Network. Indeed, at Tsukula University, one of Japan's premier science and technology universities, they are building an ATM campus backbone with 13 ATM switches activated in the present network environment by 37 CISCO routers with ATM interfaces.
PAST & PRESENT: Universities worldwide have and are a driving force in the evolution of networking. Why? - many reasons but clearly some are:
As with the ARPANET came the discovery that you could also use this tool to communicate with other people and to share information. As other networks based on ARPANET technology sprung up, they were interconnected together, allowing information and communication to be shared between them.
The early adopters of the internetworking technology that created the ARPANET and subsequent networks were the universities. Many universities took on the role of network construction workers, building campus-wide backbones and connecting them to regional networks. In the early days, it was the network engineers at the universities who tested and improved new networking protocols and technologies. Universities have been the innovators and have had the vision to build networks that eliminate the boundaries of time and place.
25 YEARS LATER THE INTERNET IS:
It's estimated that every 20 minutes, another network is connected to the Internet. As an example, on April 11, 1994, IBM announced a pilot project to place the Vatican Library on-line and accessible via the Internet. Carnegie Mellon will shortly make its 1 million volume library available on the Internet. Files on literature, art, the latest science data - available to anyone on the Internet. Truly a global school house - library - museum - without walls or boundaries.
But perhaps the greatest future potential for networks in education is not in the university - but in primary education and life-long learning. Of all the institutions that are part of our life, the one that has changed perhaps the least in the past 50 years is primary or K-12 education. Visit your grade school or high school and I think you will see this is the case.
True, in parts of the world PC's have made it into the lab or perhaps the classroom. But the value of computers increases dramatically when they are connected to each other. There is a story about the magic of networks that asks you to imagine a car plunked down in the jungle. Checking it out, you might find it a very useful piece of equipment indeed. A multipuprose wonder with lights, bedding, radio, tape player, air conditioning, heat, and coffee cup holders. In awe of the features of the machine, you might never realize that the real magic of a car comes in conjunction with roads. So it is with computers in the classroom. The real magic comes when they are networked to the world.
While there are no solid statistics, today in the U.S. it is estimated that some 250,000 students and educators at the primary and secondary level have access to the Internet -- mostly via dial up accounts. Only about 200 schools are directly connected. But this is likely to change dramatically in the next five years.
CISCO, like many other companies, has adopted two schools (K-8) in the school district where our headquarters is located in East Menlo Park, California. The school student population is principally Hispanic, Black and Pacific Islander. Both schools have computer labs and have dial up network connectivity.
This past year, the fifth grade class at one of the schools (Flood) undertook a science project via the network with a fifth grade class at the Woodside School, a Caucasian and very affluent community about ten miles away. While the learning was an important part of what took place, the most important factor was the electronic friendships that developed. At the end of the project, a joint presentation of the two classes was held at the Flood School and these electronic friendships became personal friendships. Several in the Flood School class have also started emailing school board members at work.
In the global schoolhouse, the benefits of networking come in many subtle ways.
The Bush School in Seattle, Washington, is one of the first schools in the world to give Internet accounts to all the students, not just the teachers. Fred Dust, the school's headmaster, relates how the Internet plays a very important role in learning, professional development and parental involvement at his school.
"All the teachers, students and parents are encouraged to participate," he says, "The results have been tremendously positive." For example, two ninth graders were experimenting one day with on-line library access. Not content with the local libraries, they connected to a catalog in Mexico. To their surprise, the interface greeted them in Spanish. "That floored them," said Mr. Dust. "They'd lived their lives in English-speaking Washington state, had taken classes in Spanish, but hadn't realized it was actually 'used' somewhere. They also realized their entrance into other countries wouldn't be blocked by the technology, but by language barriers. It was a very powerful discovery that they made on their own. This experience couldn't have been duplicated in a classroom setting."
Cisco recently opened a development and support center in Raleigh, N.C. While that state has several excellent universities, it is ranked very close to the bottom in primary and secondary education. The state is currently in the process of installing a state-wide ATM network connecting all of its schools in order to provide quality teaching statewide via distance learning using the state's very best teachers.
The importance of networking and the Internet in K-12 education has been clearly demonstrated. The benefits include:
(At CISCO, every employee uses a computer - many have access to more than one. We are a knowledge company, a product of the information age.)
Unlike the schoolhouse of today, the global schoolhouse of tomorrow will not look, act or feel like the schoolhouse in which we learned. That new schoolhouse is being architected, designed and tested as we speak. One excellent example is the Global Schoolhouse Project. It uses a Macintosh or a P.C.; inexpensive video hardware; free software called CU-See me (from, you guessed it, a University - Cornell); and, last but most cept the post-graduate assignment of life-long learning.
Dr. Casper was followed by Tom Peters, author and management consultant, who having just completed a year of worldwide travel, declared that the new global competition would not be based on the cost of labor but would be a battle of the brain - individual and collective.
In the past, most learning was the result of experience - on the job training. More recently, many institutions have the information and education that it provides access to is a major factor in refreshing our human capital.
CLOSING
Let me close with an observation and a challenge. Over the past hundred years, there have been many significant inventions that have impacted how the people on this globe communicate, as individuals and as institutions. The telephone and yes, voice mail, radio, movies, the jet airplane, TV, Federal Express, fax and a long list of others.
Today, we are building a new communication model, unlike most earlier forms. A global highway that carries data today - voice and video tomorrow. An information and knowledge environment without boundaries where you don't have to be known to join. A model that grows strangely within and upon itself. Today, much of the technical plumbing is available or planned.
The challenge is the availability of the human capital with the ability and desire to use this new communication paradigm. That challenge is very much a personal challenge for all of us at this conference.
Starting today, become a good Samaritan on the cyber super slab. Join me in helping the technically young and inexperienced, regardless of age, to gain access to this electronic highway and aid them in their journeys to distant information and human destinations around the globe. I believe that we, they, indeed all of humankind will be much the better for it.
THANK YOU.
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