COMPUTER INTELLIGENCE (CI) in La Jolla, Calif., a computer and communications analyst, found that 36.9 million PCs are regularly accessing the Internet in the United States, but overall growth is leveling off.

"While the Internet r emains the nexus of activity in the PC and telecommunications industries, the growth in the number of users of the Internet is clearly slowing," said CI senior industry analyst Dave Tremblay.

Growth in the number of Internet users in the last seven months has been stronger in businesses (28 percent) than it has been in the home (16 percent).

E-mail and Web surfing were the most common applications in 1997, used by over 80 percent, and a minority of users purchased over the Internet: 17 percent for financial services, 10 percent for PC products and 6 percent for consumer-electronics products.

EE TIMES'S U.K. EDITOR, Peter Clarke, believes Cadence's new "design center" in Scotland could mean good things for the Silicon Glen. Check out his online "Letter from Europe".

JAN. 13-16: The 1998 RSA Data Security Conference
in San Francisco has been dubbed "the sine-qua-non event
of the crypto community." The event will see over
3,000 cryptographers, policy-makers and developers,
and the site has all the information.

ELECTRONIC TECHNIQUES ANGLIA LTD. (Suffolk, England), which designs and manufactures wound components for telecommunications, has a site. Find data sheets, app notes and news from the 30-year-old company.

SENSITRON SEMICONDUCTOR (Deer Park, N.Y.), a maker of discrete semiconductors and custom hybrids and microwave assemblies for the military and space/aerospace industries, is offering catalogs and data books on-site. Also find info MOSFET/IGBT power modules and discrete/surface-mount IGBTs.

SEMICONDUCTOR EQUIPMENT CORP. (Moorpark, Calif.), which designs and makes manual and semiautomatic assembly-and-test equipment used in the production of microelectronic devices for the semiconductor, hybrid and printed-circuit industries, has a site with company and product info.

TECHONLINE HAS IMPROVED its technical catalog, enabling engineers to search a large database of processors, boards, systems and software. Find specs for DSP and embedded products at their site.

"COMPUTER COST-EFFECT IVENESS has risen 100 millionfold since the late 1950s-a 100,000-fold rise in power times a thousandfold drop in cost.

"Three years ago, all the world's phone networks combined carried an average of a terabit/second. Now, 3 terabits/s is being sent on a single fiber thread the width of a human hair.

"Put those numbers together, and in a direct line from the quantum discoveries at the beginning of the 20th century-you have the assurance of boundless bandwidth in the 21st."

- George Gilder, fellow at the Discovery Institute

ENGINEERS LOOKING TO BUY BOOKS on the Web, and weary of sifting through amazon.com and Barnes & Noble's general interest sites, have welcome relief from the Computer Literacy (Bookshops+Online) company.

The firm's four phy sical stores-in San Jose, Sunnyvale and Cupertino, Calif., and Vienna, Va.-are mirrored on-site, with lots of added-value for Web visitors.

Most notable is the huge inventory of searchable computer books (more than 20,000 titles in all) and all are available for same-day shipping. These books are also helpfully indexed into subject classifications.

Artificial intelligence, business, database, hardware, multimedia, networking, operating systems, and programming are just some of the topics to browse. There are also reviews and useful info on each book.

Computer Literacy works with the editors of EE Times on a recommended reading list to keep EEs in the loop on the latest and best related releases.

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