At home you insert a CD into a hi-fi system, press play, and get instant music. And yet the same storage technology requires unreasonable mental gymnastics when used for data on a PC. This epitomises the difficult nature of IT - it is just far too complex. Why make interfaces so convoluted and painful to use? Over 80% of the population are turned off by such unnecessary complexity and only a small elite have access to the information world.

In the closing years of this century we can look forward to new devices and machines that will allow simpler and more natural access to information and networks. The first of these is the set top box coupled into internet so that we can cruise the web on the TV screen with a hand-held controller. They are on the market in the USA at $300 and proving popular as people with no previous IT or net experience quickly gain a foothold and understanding.

Looking to the root of the issue, it has to be the screen, mouse, keyboard and a computer science mentality. What is needed is a consumer science approach. Why not voice command and control for the typing of letters, organisation and retrieval files, net cruising and talking to each other. Early products of this kind are now available and advancing beyond the experimental stage. Natural humanised interfaces are probably the only hope of mass usage, and we are gradually moving in the direction of intelligent things. TV, hi-fi, telephones, computers, domestic appliances and cars that we can talk to are being developed.

By the year 2000 we might just see the Star Trek world of the badge communicators and generalised intelligence in computers all around us. But with this world will come chaos in the mathematical sense. The World Wide Web has already become the World Wide Wait due to the correlated activities of thousands of users clustering around specific sites or driven to particular routes in networks. And a similar disease is now evident in telephone networks which has so far coped well with TV and radio phone-in programmes, and mobile telephony, that are highly correlated. But increasingly new applications and customer demands stray beyond the original statistics used to design telephone networks. The sharing of resources on a grand scale worked well when we made a few short duration calls each day. However, cruising the net with a hold time of several hours, or the mobile organiser/lap top and GSM combination polling every half hour, and holding for less than a minute, are challenging propositions. In the former case resource sharing is stretched to the point where switching sites cannot cope, and in the second the signalling, control and billing systems can be brought down by the sheer volume of demand. So we might expect the telephone network to be stressed in two opposing directions they were never designed to accommodate.

The ultimate solution to this rapidly emerging world of chaos is to engineer new network types. For the net cruisers it would be best to by-pass the telephone switching system and give direct net access. the case of rapid pollers, additional layers of call handling capability are required. The reality is no-one actually knows what is going to happen, but it is obvious there will be an increase in chaotic activity with NCs and computers we wear. This probably constitutes the major challenge for networking at the turn of the century as no one yet knows how to design the GII, and there may not be a singular solution.