The buying and selling of goods and services - in short, doing business - is so much a part of our conception of society that we tend to take it for granted, as if the mechanisms evolved along with human nature. But, basic as they may seem, with the growth of network computing and the emergence of electronic commerce, many assumptions about the way business works are being rethought. New ways of doing business are being created, and as a result, barriers are being lowered and novel forms of interactions between buyers and sellers are flourishing.
The ability of individuals to reach out through their browsers to shop, bank and
access a variety of services is only part of the story. The true range of e-commerce is far broader, and its full implications are still being explored. One thing is clear:
innovative technology will be required to fully exploit the possibilities in this area. In "Commerce in Cyberspace", the cover story of this issue, Robert Pool describes several of the e-commerce projects underway at IBM to develop the needed infrastructure.
Deep Blue's victory over world chess champion Garry Kasparov in their recent epic encounter gave a boost to the perennial speculation about minds and machines. While Deep Blue doesn't think in the conventional sense of the term, Kasparov himself has speculated on the future of the game in which players will square off, each possessed of a computer to help examine certain lines of play and complement human intuition. Already, a similar alliance is making itself felt in another creative quarter of the mind - musical composition. In "Rhythm and (Big) Blue", Katherine Silberger looks at the some of the programs being developed to exploit the use of computers in music, as well as novel uses of sound to enhance computing.
IBM scientists and engineers have produced many of the advances in storage technology. In particular, IBM developed the first commercial magnetic hard disk drive and has led the way in density-enhancing improvements. In "Leading the Way in Storage", Bruce Schechter recounts some of the key innovations in that evolution and reports on exploratory research into alternate technologies that may come to fruition in the next century.
"Knowing When to Switch", by Michael Sinclair, is a look at an emerging paradigm change in networking that is occurring in response to congestion in the routers that forward packets of data. By combining switching and routing, data can be switched onto the equivalent of express lanes, bypassing potential bottlenecks. Building on the company's lead in ATM switching technology, IBM researchers have come up with an effective way of doing this.
Getting data through networks as rapidly as possible is one challenge; ensuring that the data has not been tampered with en route and authenticating the sender is another. In "Making the Internet More Secure" , Sara Hedberg describes the development of HMAC, a means of verifying the integrity of the data and the authenticity of the sender. Already an Internet standard, it is also widely used in many commercial products.
Finally, in this issue we are inaugurating a department devoted to first-of-a-kind solutions. Peter Gwynne gets this new section under way with a story about parcel sorting, a solution that drew on technologies from several IBM labs.
In future issues, watch for stories on clustering technology, an innovation in pen-based computing, new Internet technologies, a report on the worldwide Industry Solution Labs, and more.
