IEE Electronics Division: Chairman´s address. Communications in the 21st Century

A restrained extrapolation is made on the basis of the further development of some of today´s technology seen against a background of the finite radio spectrum and limited energy resources. Present-day communications have become established as a set of complementary services, radio, television, telephone, letters, newspapers, records, films etc, with separate terminal devices and each having their own distribution channels. It is assumed that in the 21st century the techniques, such as antenna array signal processing, will lead to much more effective use of the radio spectrum and that optical fibres will provide a wideband switched network to the local area. In these circumstances it will be economically and operationally attractive to integrate communications systems providing a wide variety of functions. It is postulated that most `deliveries¿¿ connected with information and entertainment will be electronic, leaving physical transportation for essentials like food and fuel or luxuries like `limited editions¿¿ and paintings where there is pleasure derived from direct association with the originator of the art work. The question of man adapting to the machine or the machine adapting to man is discussed. It is concluded that further developments in speech recognition are more likely than man learning to speak or read in a binary language suitable for direct communication with computers. It is noted that there has been little change in the basic transducers of electronic communications (i.e. the microphone, loudspeaker, television-camera tube and c.r.t. display) since their first introduction. Although electronic aural communications are close to saturating the capability of the human receptor, electronic visual communication has a long way to go before it saturates the capability of the eye-brain combination.