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 Photographs By Eric Millette |
| George Gilder has seen the future, and it is optics. The still-emerging technology "promises millionfold advances in cost-
effectiveness" for all sorts of devices, from handhelds to servers to the Internet, he says. Gilder, 61, believes optics are increasing computing power faster than Moore's law, which says that computer processing power roughly doubles, while prices drop by half, every 18 months. One of his favorites: BlueArc, a privately held company that uses optics to speed data storage by up to 10 times, while increasing the amount of accessible storage space by as much as 30 times, Gilder says. Optics, he believes, are part of the "new physics of the 21st century" that will unlock Internet bottlenecks and improve productivity. Expensive? Sure. But Gilder says it's one technological advance that companies can't afford to pass up, "even if we're in the middle of a depression." The former Reagan Administration speechwriter and conservative political pundit began pushing the power of optics in the early 1990s, just before the rush to install fiber-optic cable around the globe. Gilder--author, guru, geek--might have been light-years ahead of his time. By Geoffrey Smith in Boston
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