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Synopsis
The crystal ball of the next technological era. Leading scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs provide vivid accounts of the latest inventions, revealing how the new international balance of power really lies in information technology.
Library Journal
Gilder connects his fascination with the computer as a savior of the conservative ethic with his mystical economic theories (as in his Wealth and Poverty , LJ 3/1/81) in this densely written account of the ``microcosm'' of computer technology, where innovations are occurring in the design of smaller and smaller computer chips. The first sections are largely a history of entrepreneurial goings-on in Silicon Valley; Gilder spent much time with the players, and seems to understand this murky world. If only he could tell us : The prose is often turgid or acronym-laden and unintelligible. The economics come at the end, where Gilder prophesies, broadly, that when we finally get the billion-transistor chip, the world's problems and conflicts will evaporate. This is Gilder's old ideological tract, gussied up in silicon, with scalding indictments of anything that isn't ``entrepreneurial,'' i.e., unregulated, and of the old thinking that caused all the problems in the first place.-- Mark L. Shelton, Columbus, Ohio