July 13, 1988

Dr. Stephen Weinstein
Bellcore
445 South Street, Room 2E288
Morristown, New Jersey 07960-1910

Dear Steve:

Adam Hodgkin and I thoroughly enjoyed our visit to Bellcore. We are impressed by the work that is going on and the number of good ideas that we were introduced to during the day.

The Telesophy project is particularly interesting. This is the first large-scale prototype of an electronic library that I have seen. Bruce Schatz and his colleagues deserve considerable credit for overcoming many of the obstacles which have frustrated similar projects. I understand that this project is low priority at Bellcore, but I hope that you will find some way to prevent the effort from dying completely. In our Mercury Electronic Library we will be tackling many of the same issues and would hope to find some way to build on the previous work.

There is considerable interest amongst universities at present to develop a high-speed national network. It is interesting that, as I look at the range of applications which might run on such a network, two stand out:

supercomputing, and electronic documents. At present, the dominant application is gaining access to supercomputers, but a few years from now, as products like Telesophy can be made into production systems, electronic libraries and document interchange may be the major applications.

Sincerely,

WilIliam Y. Arms

WYA:reb-a

cc: Bruce Schatz

Donald Walker