Long distance data transmission is getting faster. This is largely a result of fiber optic cables coming into use on a wide scale. The use of pulse code modulation by the telephone company has made a data rate of 64 Kbits/sec the norm for a voice channel, although at present the ordinary subscriber does not see those bits; what he gets is an analog voice grade connection.

Leased circuits of one Mbit/sec are no longer uncommon, and even higher bit rates are coming into use. We may expect dramatic improvement in the availability and cost of wide bandwidth hosting as the long haul data business becomes more competitive. It is not too much to hope that we are moving away from a famine situation towards something approaching a free market situation in which those prepared to pay will be able to get what they need.

New activities, based on wide-band digital technology, are growing all the time. Not all of them make demands on telecommunication bandwidth. For example, we are witnessing the birth of a new industry seeking to exploit the enormous storage capacity of CD-ROMs, a data version of the familiar compact discs used for audio recording.

The Oxford English Dictionary has been available in this form for some time, and it has been possible to exploit its resources in new and imaginative ways. For example, whereas formerly it was only possible to access an entry under its head word, it is now possible to search for key words within the entries themselves. CD-ROMs can also be used to store digitized video, and before very long it will be possible to buy television entertainment in that form.

Parallel developments are taking place in computer research laboratories. It is not uncommon to see a television image displayed in a window on a workstation, while other windows display text, graphics, programs, and data in the usual way. At the present time, the television pictures are usually in analog form and are incapable of being manipulated by the processor. However, advanced research is being done with digital representation and this opens up endless possibilities for the editing and merging of images.

Desktop editing of images may become an important computer application in the way desktop publishing has done. Since the borderline between editing an image for legitimate reasons and editing it for purposes of misrepresentation is not easy to draw, these developments are likely to present judges and lawmakers with some interesting challenges.

Coming into use are databases for personnel records in which biographical summaries along with a digital photograph can be displayed on a computer terminal. We may undoubtedly expect to see, alongside the computer documents that we know today, a new kind of document in which text, voice, and images will be integrated. Images, especially moving images, require a vast number of bits, even if compression techniques are employed. If the passing of multimedia documents between one computer site and another becomes a frequent operation, then the load imposed on computer networks will be considerable.