I'd rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.

I was nine or 10 years old and my father was sacked on Christmas Day. He was a manager the results had not been good he lost a game on December 22 or 23. On Christmas Day the telephone rang and he was sacked in the middle of our lunch.

The fear of the never-ending onslaught of gizmos and gadgets is nothing new. The radio the telephone Facebook - each of these inventions changed the world. Each of them scared the heck out of an older generation. And each of them was invented by people who were in their 20s.

Tell me about yourself - your struggles your dreams your telephone number.

But then I'm one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music.

I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world and machines - TV telephone cars - were still more or less ancillary and computers were unheard of in everyday life.

Originally I was in both software and in online computing. The first innovation really was sort of at that time that we're marrying the telephone and the computer so that people wouldn't have to drive to the computer center. We didn't have $1 000 computers.

Before computers telephone lines and television connect us we all share the same air the same oceans the same mountains and rivers. We are all equally responsible for protecting them.

Many of our own people here in this country do not ask about computers telephones and television sets. They ask - when will we get a road to our village.

Just as characteristic perhaps is the intellectual interdependence created through the development of the modern media of communication: post telegraph telephone and popular press.