Elizabeth Weise Technology Reporter, Life Elizabeth Weise is a technology reporter for USA TODAY's Life section. Before that she spent six years with the Associated Press, first in Seattle and then in San Francisco. She studied Chinese and Swedish at the University of Washington, which was a lot of fun but had absolutely nothing to do with her going into journalism--except in that a few years after she graduated she ran into a friend from Chinese class who said he was volunteering at the local National Public Radio affiliate. That seemed like such a cool thing to do that Weise quit her job as an administrative assistant and went to work at KUOW for free, painting houses on the weekends to pay the rent while she learned how to be a reporter. It was the absolutely best decision she ever made in her life, except perhaps for getting married last October.

Q: In your opinion, what marks the genesis of the Information Age? How far have we come since then?

A: I'd say it has to be the development of the first electronic computers, which began during World War II and has been accelerating ever since. Those first computers were built to help calculate ballistic tables for the troops, so they'd know at where shells shot from different angles under different conditions would land. The computations were amazingly complex, they had to figure out where the shell would be in the air every 10th of a second, taking into account the speed it was shot at, the angle of the gun, its size and even gravity.

The men were all at war, so the military had rooms full of young women straight from college doing all the calculations with slide rules-a very slow way to do it. The mathematicians and engineers who started working on the problem then didn’t finish in time for the war effort, but that push is what made the PC of today possible. (A good book on all this is "Engines of the Mind" by Joel Shurkin)

As far as how far we've come, we’re still at the very beginning, I think. Although computers today seem almost miraculous compared to the room-sized mainframes of just 30 years ago, they're still too complicated and prone to breakdowns to really let people take advantage of their power.

As they become easier, they'll become less visible in our daily lives. When a technology has truly arrived, it becomes invisible. We don't think of the telephone as this hugely complex and technological device connected by wires to substations all over the world; we just pick them up and talk. That's how computers will become, sooner rather than later I hope.

Q: What have been the most significant changes in technology in the last 20 years? The last 5?

A: The most significant change in the last 20 years is the arrival of the personal computer. In 1978 regular people didn't own computers. It would be like owning your own power station-you wouldn't be able to afford one and no one would understand why you'd want one for yourself anyway.

Today, I can sit at my desk and run a spreadsheet, do word processing, create animation-things that 20 years ago most people did with pen and paper and, if they were lucky, a calculator. PCs give us this amazing power over data in ways that folks in 1979 couldn't even imagine.

In the last five years of course, the breakthrough has been the Internet. Although the Net existed in a much smaller form since the early 1970s, it wasn't something that was accessible to everyone until just the last five years-and really since the coming of the World Wide Web, which hit in 1993 for most people.

Q: Microsoft's impact on technology has obviously been immeasurable. Are there any other companies or individuals who are lesser known, but have still made enormous or significant contributions?

A: Tons of them-but most of the really interesting research that's been done hasn't come out of corporations; it's been the result of scientists and researchers, students and hackers, fooling around and coming up with cool ideas. It always seems to take years for those cool ideas to filter down to a computer in someone's house.

Xerox, at its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) developed the computer mouse, the whole notion of computer windows and even the idea of the Graphical User Interface (the GUI, pronounced "gooey") which is just the idea that instead of a long list of files on a screen, you have little icons that tell you what things are. The Web was invented by researchers at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics.

And Linux, the new operating system that seems like it might give Microsoft a serious run for its money, was invented by a 21 year old Finnish graduate student back in 1991.

Q: How long have you been covering technology and its trends? What is your favorite part about it? What are some of the biggest changes you have seen since you first began this beat?

A: I started out back in 1988 when I wrote a story about this company near Seattle that had created these really cool little disks that could store an entire encyclopaedia. The disks were called CD-ROMs and the company was called Microsoft.

The best part is that it's all so cool! Amazing, fascinating things pop up every other week it seems. We're all living on Internet time, new companies, new products, new ideas every month. It's not like covering city government, where it can take a year for a report to get written or a law to get passed. On the Internet, someone comes up with an idea and six months later it's selling in the stores.

The biggest change I've seen is watching the Internet go from a primarily research-based entity populated by scientists and students (and 90% male) to a world-wide network of regular people, all in the space of five or so years. I can remember when the Net was totally text based and still an official government project and you couldn't advertise or sell anything on it. People would get freaked out if someone posted a for sale ad for an old computer somewhere online, everyone thought some government watchdog would swoop down kill of your account for misusing the Net!

Q: How do you differentiate between technological advancements and innovation?

A: Advancement is the new Pentium III computer chip. It's faster than the Pentium II, but it doesn’t do anything fundamentally different. Innovation is a leap into the unknown, the new. The mouse was innovative.

Q: Last year's satellite-pager fiasco proved that technology may not be able to keep up with itself. Will the potential for such catastrophes always be there?

A: Yes, and it will get worse as we become more dependant on technology. It used to be that if there was a crash on a freeway somewhere, traffic backed up behind it for miles but once you got ten or so mile away it was as if nothing had happened. But as technology becomes more networked, a single error can cascade down through the network and knock out everything in its path. The pager failure was a good example of that. Or the online brokerage houses and online auctions sites which suddenly go off line, keeping hundreds of thousands of people from their accounts.

Q: What do you think of Web TV? (i.e., how successful has it been, what does its future look like, etc.) Would you consider iMac its biggest competitor?

A: WebTV's quite brilliant. People forget that if you just want email and the Web you don't need a $1,500 computer, you can spend $99 for Web TV and do just fine. So the iMac isn't really a competitor, because it's very much a full service computer, and at $1,200 or so it's hardly in the same price range.

Usability expert Donald Norman believes that eventually we’ll stop buying one computer to do everything from writing letters to playing games to surfing the Web to compiling spreadsheets and instead have separate, inexpensive "information devices" to do each individual thing. Just as we now have a Sony PlayStation to play games on, we'll have a WebTV-like box to surf the Web and read email, a screen for doing word processing and spreadsheets and maybe a different one to track our bank statements and bills. Cheaper and more specialized products make more sense than paying thousands of dollars for a machine that does a lot of things that we don't really need. If you never word process or do spreadsheets, why do you need anything more than a PlayStation and Web TV? And if you just buy those two, you've saved about $1,500 off the price of a fully loaded computer.

Q: With technology being such a fluid field, constantly changing and redefining itself, how are you able to stay on top of it all?

A: By constantly reading. Trade magazines, newspapers, magazines, books, Web sites, email, electronic mailing lists. You have to constantly be scanning the horizon for the next big thing, which could come from any direction. It's exhilarating but sometimes it's exhausting.