FROM WORLD-WIDE-WEB TO INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY

This paper reviews the origin of the information superhighway paradigm and the many resulting national initiatives or plans, including the U S NII and the world-wide GII. The guiding principles are quoted, and a list of possible future services is presented, together with an overv iew of the major technological avenues. Then, the paper discusses the current prototype of the future universal information infrastructure, that is the Internet and its killer application, the World-Wide Web. I t discusses which requirements are currently satisfied by the Internet plus WWW combination, and which capabilities are not yet provided. It concludes by presenting a possible scenario of evolution. Several par ts of this article are reproduced from the book Understanding Networke d Multimedia by Francois Fluckiger (Prentice-Hall, 1995).