swallow that lets you know everything you need to know about the french revolution, so says nicholas negroponti has been spouting this for decades. except most of what he says is true. >> it's clear that everything that could be digital would be digital. so when you transmit digital signals they lend themselves to doing things that they previously couldn't. for example over the air became a much more controllable, you could make cells, you could do things that previously were not possible. and the tv set, and the cables that came into our homes at that time, were fixed, they were using real estate in the sense that there was an it couldn't move. so why would a tv set use anything but a cable? and why would phones, so it was so certain that it was going to happen. >> you had fla naysayers, cliffd said, soon you'll buy books over the internet. sure this was 1995. >> i got pleasure over that kind of criticism because i knew they were i don' wrong. and it was kind of, let's wait and see. i remember when we did early work on color displays. we built, very early in my career, color displays that were