NetDay96: A Glimpse of Possibilities

By Frank del Olmo

Saturday, March 9, 1996, was NetDay in California. And if you have only a vague notion of what that means, don't feel too bad about it.

Like me, you are probably among those who are still tiptoeing uneasily into that brave new world where the boundaries are only defined by the technical limits of personal computers and their links to the Internet. To hear computer enthusiasts talk, that means it is a world with virtually no boundaries.

NetDay96 was the idea of two such enthusiasts: John Gage, the chief scientist for Sun Microsystems in the Silicon Valley, and Michael Kaufman, the director of information technology at a San Francisco TV station. They organized it as a "high-tech barn-raising." The goal was to have all 13,000 public, private, and parochial schools in California linked to the Internet by community volunteers. (See Education...