Background
Perhaps more than any other technical area, information and communication technologies are what make our society "modern." The ability to rapidly access and share vast amounts of information has been the driving force in economic growth and improved quality of life in the latter part of the twentieth century. Accordingly, information and communication technologies are essential to meeting national goals in economic growth and national security, and in helping other technical areas to realize their full potential. The technologies identified as critical include those contributing to the leading edge of components, communications, computer systems, information management, intelligent complex adaptive systems, sensors and software and toolkits. Of these areas, components, computer systems, communications, information management, and software and toolkits have the highest potential to contribute to economic growth. Computer systems (particularly high performance systems), intelligent complex adaptive systems and sensors have significant potential to contribute to national security.

With the exception of high-definition displays and high-resolution scanning, the U.S. is ahead, or at least at parity, in almost all the fields comprising the Information and Communication technology category. The U.S. invented and widely deployed such technologies as UNIX, the Ethernet, the Internet, LANs, and most of the field of artificial intelligence; U.S.-developed operating systems for personal computers are the world standard; our digital HDTV plans lead the world. The National Display Initiative will help to fill in the gap in high-definition displays, and in most areas where we have some weakness, U.S. firms are forming alliances with other firms in Japan and Europe, leading to multinational initiatives. (NCT Report 1995)