Road Trip! Reporter Probes E-Habits At 8 Colleges

[JackSpratts]

Earlier this year a Fortune reporter with boyfriend in tow descended on eight college campuses in 33 days to get a handle on what’s new and what’s coming. This fascinating story serves up a look at how the students relate to their personal and public e-tech, from P2P to IM to stuff still in the labs and how some of it may be seconds away from impacting everyone else. Like you and me.

- js.

[multi]

good read thanx jack...

Smarr believes firmly that the "mwahahahas" of the world, the fruits of idle curiosity, are what generate the best new technologies. The really good stuff percolates up to popularity. He should know: He spent 15 years as the director of NCSA at the University of Illinois and was there when Marc Andreessen helped develop the Mosaic browser, which percolated quite nicely and eventually became the basis for Netscape.

(and IE as well ?)

NCSA Mosaic is free for internal use by commercial organizations, and is also available for licensing by commercial organizations for modification and/or distribution. For information, please contact the author. For more information on the NCSA Mosaic project in general, please feel free to contact the author.

- Marc Andreessen, NCSA Mosaic Technical Summary, Feb 20, 1993.

boy did M$ take that and run with it...

this guys got the right idea ,eh...

Case in point: Josh Michaels, a senior at the University of Illinois, who invites us to his apartment to "demo his house" for us.

Barefoot and in a baseball cap, Michaels sits cross-legged on his bed and reaches over to grab a teeny tiny laptop off his bedside table. He begins tapping away on its little keyboard. "I want to be able to control every device in this apartment without getting out of my bed," he says, explaining that all the gizmos in the place--including his coffee grinder and espresso machine--can be controlled via the wireless network he's built. He types a command and pauses dramatically--then, sure enough, his stereo roars (playing Radiohead's OK Computer). He types a bit more, and his bedside lamp clicks on; next he's browsing the Web on the laptop's miniature screen. Michaels can access his TiVo, his Xbox, and his DVD player this way. He doesn't even have to leave his bed to check whether the pizza he's ordered has arrived. All he has to do is glance at the homemade security camera and monitor he set up on the bureau across the room.