(FORTUNE Magazine) – ALL IS VANITY, said the Preacher, and there is nothing new under the sun. Well, maybe there wasn't in the time of King Solomon, and anyway the author of Ecclesiastes was pondering the human condition, not man's evolution as toolmaker and healer. In these high-tech last days of the second millennium A.D., something new whizzes by practically every minute. In just the past dozen years the personal computer has transformed offices; videocassette recorders and compact discs have revolutionized home entertainment; and biotechnology has conferred genetically engineered vaccines and a host of other benefits on mankind. The next dozen years will bring the world to the year 2000. What further wonders are lurking in the labs today that will be commonplace when the next century begins? ''We'll see a minimum of ten times as much progress in the next 12 years as we've seen in the past 12,'' exults John Peers, president of Novix Inc., a Silicon Valley company that recently put a computer language on a chip to give new zip to communications-signal processing. He adds, ''I wouldn't want to be a science fiction writer today because reality is leaping ahead of fantasy.'' Quite soberly Peers and his peers on the high-tech frontiers say that by the year 2000: -- Computers that don't look and act like computers will surround you -- shirt-pocket and notebooklike devices that respond to handwritten and spoken queries and commands, maybe even gestures. -- In corporate research centers, supercomputers 1,000 times more powerful than today's will calculate electron interactions in molecules in order to create materials that never existed before. -- When you travel, you may carry along an electronic book that opens up to display text on two facing screens. The book's memory will contain as many as 200 novels or nonfiction volumes; you just write the name of the one you want to read -- and up it pops. -- Your doctor will check your heart by having you walk through a diagnostic machine rivaling Dr. McCoy's on Star Trek. That's just a glimpse of the year 2000, when ''we'll have capabilities no humans ever had,'' says Ralph E. Gomory, senior vice president for science and technology at IBM. Gomory, 59, adds, ''When my father was young, he used to take a horse-drawn carriage to the railroad station. There were no automobiles, no telephones, no movies. No airplane had ever flown. There was no television, no atomic bomb, no man on the moon. But by the time he died, he had flown in a jet and had seen all those other things happen. No generation had ever been through a transformation like that.'' With all that has happened already, why are today's high-technologists so superconfident that the next 12 years will lead to a technological as well as a chronological millennium? What could possibly top all that has gone before? The answer is that now, in contrast with earlier decades of invention, man stands at the dawn of the Age of Insight -- a new era of understanding how things work and how to make them work better. In both electronics and biotechnology, the two principal fountainheads of new products, the immediate future holds not just the compilation of more and more data but also some startling new visions. In the view of many scientists, the computer is being transformed from a number cruncher into a machine for insight and discovery. It will become an instrument even more revolutionary than the microscope or the telescope. Unlike those fabulous and still evolving tools, the computer can look into the future. Supercomputers do it already by forecasting weather a few days ahead. As they leap forward in power, by the year 2000 they will be forecasting the structures of new materials and simulating such cosmic phenomena as the evolution of stars and galaxies. The new Age of Insight will also offer views of the workings of the human body never before attainable. Deciphering the interactions of the body's own healing substances and the underlying causes of disease will allow researchers to develop novel drugs and methods of treatment. They will increasingly tap the body itself as a new pharmacopeia, an almost inexhaustible trove of medications that genetic engineers can copy and improve on. CONVERGING with these new insights and new computing power is the rapid emergence of telecommunications networks. It is as if -- for a change -- high- powered cars and sleek highways to accommodate them were arriving at the same time. Telecommunications experts see nothing less than a world linked by great computerized networks that process voice, data, and video with equal ease. The first ISDNs -- integrated services digital networks -- are just going into service in the U.S., Japan, and Western Europe. In a few years they are expected to yield billion-dollar annual savings to corporations in increased productivity and lowered communications costs. The certainty of these advances makes the experts drool. ''I've never been as excited about the future and about the speed with which we're making progress,'' says Gordon Bell, vice president for research and development at Ardent Computer of Sunnyvale, California, a maker of supercomputers. Bell is one of the world's top computer designers and visionaries: He led the development of Digital Equipment's landmark VAX computer systems. Now he is pioneering the new insight and discovery machines. Most of the underlying technologies for products that will be on the market by the year 2000 are already in the labs or just entering them. Walter Utz, Hewlett-Packard's manager of advanced engineering, notes that it takes about 12 years to translate a new technology into useful products. Since the turn of the century is only 12 years away, many of the directions have already been set. This article is based on an assessment of the future as a framework of the possible -- as helicopter pioneer Igor Sikorsky once described it -- by some 100 experts in industry, universities, federal agencies, and venture capital firms in the U.S., Western Europe, and Japan. Forty of these experts make up FORTUNE's Probability Panels, offering their predictions about the likelihood of specific innovations as shown in the accompanying tables. Surprises are bound to emerge along the way that may throw some of the predictions off track: Witness the recent surge in high-temperature superconducting materials. But, says IBM's Gomory, ''forget the unexpected -- the unexpected will just . accelerate the progress. Believe me, we're having a revolution without superconductivity or anything like that.'' A tour of what's coming by 2000: THE EXPERTS AGREE that progress in both consumer electronics and computers will continue to be led by advances in semiconductor chips. These advances have been nothing short of spectacular, and they will continue to be so. Just 18 years ago Intel Corp. pioneered a 1,024-bit, or one-kilobit, DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chip, which held about 4,000 transistors and related components. Today, four-megabit -- four-million-bit -- DRAMs with about 16 million components are already in use. ''A one-billion-transistor chip by the year 2000 is not inconceivable,'' says Robert N. Noyce, vice chairman of Intel and co-inventor of the silicon chip. He thinks that a hundredfold, perhaps even a thousandfold, improvement is still possible with conventional technology, including so-called wafer- scale integration -- building hundreds of different chips into a single system. Greater chip density makes chips cheaper and computers smaller and more reliable. Along the way a new kind of information storage and processing technology may possibly emerge. One intriguing candidate: an optical liquid-crystal medium that would allow information to be stored in three dimensions, instead of the two dimensions of today's chips. This would permit the equivalent of thousands of memory chips to be jammed into a device the size of a coffee cup, says Caltech chip designer John Hopfield. It's already clear that the galloping extension of today's technology will give computers of the year 2000 an electronic punch that will startle today's users. Desktop workstations will pack the power of what we now know as supercomputers. Supercomputers themselves will soar into the numerical stratosphere -- as will their cost. Supercomputers of the future are expected to do at least four trillion complex calculations a second -- 1,000 times more than today. The biggest may cost as much as $1 billion, but that will represent a vast improvement in computing bang for the buck. A whole corporation might be built around a single supercomputing system. One big challenge: devising appropriate software to run these supercomputers, which will likely consist of hundreds or even thousands of individual computers running in parallel. If that type of programming can be mastered, and most experts believe it will be, supercomputers will emerge as great vision- and intellect-extending engines by the year 2000. Kenneth G. Wilson, a Cornell University Nobel Prize winner in physics and an expert on supercomputing, predicts that the machines ''will open vast new domains of scientific research -- domains that are inaccessible to traditional experimental or theoretical modes of investigation.'' Supercomputers, he explains, will enable scientists to ''see'' objects on a smaller scale than microscopes can -- a vital contribution to chemistry, chemical engineering, molecular biology, and other fields. Supercomputers could also describe lightning-fast events, such as the chemistry involved in photosynthesis, in greater detail than today's instruments permit. The supercomputer of the year 2000 will emerge as an indispensable industrial tool, because its enormous capacity will make possible mathematical modeling of complex phenomena that are influenced by huge numbers of variables. Among other things, it is likely to serve by then as a full-fledged electronic wind tunnel. Where today only portions of airplanes can be tested in computers, complete airframes will be ''flown'' inside supercomputers at supersonic and hypersonic speeds. Better cars will be designed in computers because an engineer will be able to ''feel'' how a car handles before it is built. On the screen the designer could repeatedly crash his computer-model car into barriers or other cars to see how well it withstands the damage. The design of new materials should benefit spectacularly from the new supercomputer power. ''Scientists have so far explored only an infinitesimal fraction of possible forms of matter,'' says Wilson. Since the properties and structure of molecules are ultimately determined by the interactions of the electrons within them, Wilson says, sufficiently powerful supercomputers should theoretically be able to ''predict everything about a material with no experimental information whatsoever'' by calculating those interactions. He adds, ''The potential importance for both basic research and industry applications is beyond anything one can imagine today, if reliability could be achieved.'' The discovery capabilities of computers of all sizes will be enhanced by the great leap in computing power by the year 2000. The reason: the advent of what scientists have begun to call ''visual computing,'' which in effect reproduces reality mathematically within a computer so that objects can be both seen and ^ manipulated in all sorts of ways. The nature and behavior of an object or phenomenon can be described in equations and presented visually; the objects simulated can include anything from the steering mechanism of a car to the interior of a star. This kind of computing will open up new areas to scientific inquiry and bring products to market at unheard-of speeds by allowing the rapid testing of almost infinite product variations. Visual computing makes seeing become believing. It gives engineers and scientists a new window into complex realities. As Donald P. Greenberg, director of the computer graphics program at Cornell, explains it: ''I don't care whether we're traveling down the bloodstream and inside the heart, or looking at a building shaking in a simulated earthquake, or at an interior design of a house, or at a demographic projection with six variables. I just want to see what's happening so that if my model does not yield the results I anticipated, or if the interrelationships between the variables are incorrect, I can go back and change the simulation.'' Another great benefit of soaring computing power will be the arrival of the truly ''user friendly'' computer. A great gap still separates man and machine. Despite their computational brilliance, which dwarfs man's, machines have horrendous difficulty with speech recognition because people speak in unstructured and inconsistent ways. Computers have comparable problems identifying visual patterns and recognizing objects from varying angles. To the rescue, by the year 2000, may come neural circuits, simplified analogs of much more complex human auditory and visual nerves and related structures. One of those unpredictable twists in the high-tech road to the future may be a $2,000 board for PCs that will allow them to understand several hundred words of continuous speech. The board, which Digitech Inc., a small Missouri company, says it will deliver by the end of this year, uses chips that try to imitate some of the ear's sound-processing functions. Similar work is in progress in vision. Caltech's noted microchip designer Carver Mead, for instance, has already built a chip that imitates some of the eye's information processing. By putting some of these ideas into practice, says Jean-Louis Gassee, Apple Computer's senior vice president for research and development, ''by the year 2000 computers will seem magic to my wife, who really doesn't like computers.'' The day may well have come when machines respond readily to spoken commands -- and even answer back, just as the strong-willed HAL-9000 computer did in the 20-year-old film 2001: A Space Odyssey. BY THE YEAR 2000 most computers will have lost their familiar boxy shapes. The idea is to make them more compatible with people by making them look less like machines. Says Gomory: ''One way to make computers easy to use is to pretend there is no computer. Instead, you reproduce on the screen whatever you're used to. If you want to write a letter, you reproduce a piece of paper on the screen and you write on it. The computer translates your handwriting into type. If you want to file the letter, a picture of a filing cabinet appears and you stick the letter in.'' Handwriting as a means of entering data into computers, in fact, tops the list of many experts' predictions. They feel it is a more natural way to interact with computers than using keyboards, even though some people can type faster than they write and others have messy handwriting. The writing would be done on thin flat screens placed on desks, much like blotters. Companies are hard at work on putting these concepts into practice. IBM, for one, is developing components of an electronic book that would contain the text and illustrations from hundreds of volumes on a small diskette, with an easy-to-read liquid-crystal screen instead of pages. ''We could even give it to you in a leather binding, if you prefer,'' says Gomory. In addition, it could be used as a computerized workbook, a small machine for word processing and other applications that a traveler could carry along and communicate with in longhand instead of using a keyboard or a mouse. Texas Instruments is also exploring the idea. MITCHELL KAPOR designed the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet programs and is now chairman of On Technology Inc., a Cambridge, Massachusetts, software company. He sees almost all PCs assuming the shape of hard-cover books in the year 2000. He predicts the appearance of a computer-based reference book, a cross between a dictionary and an encyclopedia, that answers questions about people, places, and events. Gassee of Apple envisions computers of many sizes -- from a 3-by-5-inch card to a blackboard tapped into a database. Noyce of Intel expects to see a personalized electronic file by the year 2000. He describes this device as ''a filing system that will read and recall every piece of information that comes across my desk, or that I deal with in my daily activity.'' The device, furthermore, would have ''instant communication with every other computer.'' The function of computers will also change dramatically. They will, in essence, become instruments of access to a network over which desired information flows rapidly on demand. Telecommunications are converging with computers at an opportune time. Just as computational capabilities are beginning to soar, the telecommunications industry is rapidly switching from analog to digital transmission of signals -- the ''bit'' language of computers. Furthermore, the industry is greatly enhancing the transmission capacity of existing telephone lines to allow simultaneous transmission of voice, data, and video. A few years further in the future is wide use of capacious fiber-optic cables in business and at home. Gassee calls such a cable ''a data hydrant.'' The telephone of the year 2000 will evolve into what Bell Labs' vice president for research, Arno A. Penzias, refers to as ''an integrated information appliance.'' This would be a sleek device with a large flat screen that would allow picture-phone conferences in full color as well as offer all the other accouterments of the information age: the ability to send and receive documents and messages, act as a full-size computer, and provide access to many information sources. ROLAND C. MORENO, president of Paris-based Innovatron and inventor of a ''smart'' credit-and-charge card equipped with a chip, sees counterparts of the French Minitel system in wide use in other countries by the turn of the century. (West Germany's Bundespost, the federal postal service, is now expanding its version of the system.) Minitel replaces telephone books with a small computer terminal. Besides finding addresses, it can buy theater, plane, and train tickets, send bouquets of flowers with notes translated if need be -- albeit clumsily -- and find girlfriends or boyfriends, the machine's most popular service. Minitel is now in use in nearly four million French households and offices as a government-subsidized experiment.

Japan's entry in the future-telephone derby is likely to be an instantaneous translation telephone that will work at least in English and Japanese, for openers. NEC, the Japanese electronics giant, began research on the project in 1983. Akihiro Kitamura, a NEC vice president, says it will take at minimum another five to ten years to complete the device -- assuming the problem of recognizing continuous speech will have been mastered by then. & The Age of Insight is also revolutionizing both medical diagnosis and treatment by making them far quicker and more specific. An imposing array of new tests and instrumentation -- from antibodies that seek out harmful viruses and bacteria to vastly improved body-scanning technologies -- are opening the interior of the body to a new view. All this should allow doctors to diagnose infections in minutes instead of days and heart attacks in seconds instead of hours. They should also be able to detect tumors before symptoms appear, permitting treatment to begin earlier and drastically improving the chance of success. New insights into human diseases would spur the creation of elegant new treatments. For instance, Leroy Hood, a brilliant Caltech immunologist, says that by the year 2000 it should be essentially possible to prevent such autoimmune diseases as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and insulin- dependent diabetes, in which the body mistakenly attacks its own tissue. Clones of immune system cells gone haywire do the damage. Hood and his associates are already designing ways to remove such undesirable cell families in mice. One of the experts' most startling predictions is that by the year 2000 it should be possible to regrow whole organs, or parts of them, in the body instead of replacing them with transplants. This could come about in at least two ways. First, scientists could decipher the remarkable biological program that leads to the growth of a new heart in an embryo, for example. Second, they could repair sections of a heart that had been damaged by a heart attack, say, by administering such tissue-restoring substances as the fibroblast growth factor that the body makes to regenerate blood vessels. California Biotechnology Inc., of Mountain View, the first company to clone the factor, has shown that it significantly accelerates the healing of wounds in animals; tests on people start next year. The growth factor also appears to repair nerve cells such as those destroyed in the brains of Alzheimer's victims. BY EXTRACTING such healing substances from the human body and duplicating them through genetic engineering, scientists are cashing in on -- and enhancing -- the body's remarkable ability to heal itself. Genetic engineers have hit a potential bonanza: The body makes about 100,000 proteins. Says David Botstein, vice president for science at Genentech, the biggest U.S. biotech company: ''Suppose 1% of them have the potential of being turned into * pharmaceuticals. That's 1,000 new drugs.'' Other drugs of the year 2000 should include inexpensive and highly specific molecules tailored to fit receptors for hormones, peptides, and other substances that regulate physiological events in the body from hunger to the sex drive. These precisely targeted drugs will replace chemicals discovered by the historical trial-and-error method. Genetically engineered vaccines, such as the recently introduced hepatitis killer, could eradicate many infectious diseases, including malaria. This century's crowning achievement in biology could well turn out to be the deciphering of the human genome -- the determination of the order, content, and location of the genes on the human chromosomes that control the body's growth and well-being. Broken down to the most basic chemical level, says Hood of Caltech, those instructions would fill 500 volumes, each 1,000 pages long, each page containing 1,000 words, each word consisting of six letters of the DNA language. The mapping of the genome would open broad new avenues of medical diagnosis and treatment. In basic biology, comparative analysis of the genomes of mice, fruit flies, and people would allow scientists to break the other two still undeciphered DNA codes -- one that dictates steps in cell differentiation and development, another that governs the structure of chromosomes. CRACKING the remaining codes, Hood suggests, would raise the spectacular possibility of creating entirely new types of biostructures for medical and industrial uses. A molecule might be designed, for instance, that would connect with cancerous cells and make them revert to normal. Deciphering the genome would also allow doctors to prepare a genetic printout of a baby at birth to spot susceptibility to various diseases and to start early treatment. Surprisingly, FORTUNE's Probability Panel doubts that the most talked-about recent scientific breakthrough -- superconductivity -- will contribute much by the year 2000. The phenomenon greatly speeds the flow of electrons by cooling the conductors they pass through -- to the point where they lose resistance. But Ian Ross, president of Bell Labs, says that while superconductivity is of great interest in instrumentation, working at extremely low temperatures in computing and signal switching is ''too irksome.'' Chairman Gordon Moore of Intel adds that he is always suspicious of new technologies ''where everybody seems to be excited about it for somebody else's application. You know, 'My | view is that it doesn't impact the kinds of things we do much but the power generation people will find it great.' '' AT IBM, Gomory draws a sharp distinction between new superconducting materials as scientific discoveries and their possible technological applications. He says, ''A door has been opened into the unknown and we don't know what's on the other side. We're in a whole new world of materials. History has shown us that over time that tends to amount to something.'' But he guesses that most of those breathless forecasts about superconductivity powering 300-mile-per-hour trains and carrying electricity cheaply over long distances probably won't come true. The impact of new technology on everyday work and life in the year 2000 will be more subtle than the dramatic transformations wrought in the lifetime of Gomory's father by automobiles, airplanes, movies, antibiotics, television, spaceflight, and other marvels. Some of the changes computers will bring about will be more intellectual in content, while in biotechnology the great advances in diagnostics and treatment will be readily apparent. Says George H. Heilmeier, chief technical officer at Texas Instruments: ''In the medical field alone, the ability to bring the best medical care in the world to any local hospital will represent as big a jump as going from the horse-drawn cart to the automobile.'' There are limits, of course. None of the technological possibilities that scientists and engineers are pursuing today suggest that man will soon decipher such fundamental mysteries as the workings of the human mind or the fate of the universe. Ecclesiastes also declared, ''No man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.'' The Preacher may not have been right about new things under the sun, but on this one he hasn't been proved wrong -- yet.

CHART: TEN EXPERTS CONSENSUS Computers that recognize handwriting 7 9 9 8 8 9 9 4 9 7 7.9 Instant access to all available 9 9 7 8 10 8 3 9 4 4 7.1 information on a subject Voice-controlled computers 5 3 1 3 10 9 9 10 8 9 6.7 Gesture-controlled computers 3 8 8 6 10 1 9 10 7 3 6.5 Flat desktop computers 8 6 2 5 10 5 9 7 5 5 6.2 CREDIT: NO CREDIT CAPTION: A FORTUNE PROBABILITY PANEL COMPUTERS Ten experts in industry, universities, and government agencies rate on a scale of 1 to 10 the likelihood that each item listed will be available by the year 2000. DESCRIPTION: See above.

CHART: TEN EXPERTS CONSENSUS Voice-controlled telephones 5 8 8 10 7 8 9 10 5 8 7.8 Color fax 8 8 4 10 7 6 6 10 10 8 7.7 Combined telephone/computer/TV 9 5 8 4 8 7 8 8 2 9 6.8 Picture phones 3 4 6 7 5 6 9 10 8 8 6.6 Instantaneous-translation 4 4 5 3 3 3 3 5 1 6 3.7 telephones CREDIT: NO CREDIT CAPTION: A FORTUNE PROBABILITY PANEL TELECOMMUNICATIONS The experts give all these possible products a good chance to be on the market in 12 years except the instantaneous-translation telephone, a Japanese dream machine. DESCRIPTION: See above.

CHART: TEN EXPERTS CONSENSUS Defeat of heart disease 7 10 6 7 8 0 4 3 6 2 5.3 Defeat of AIDS virus 5 2 3 5 8 10 1 5 7 2 4.8 Defeat of rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis 8 5 5 5 2 6 5 0 6 3 4.5 Defeat of leukemia and lung cancer 6 5 5 5 4 2 3 0 2 1 3.3 Defeat of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's 3 2 4 1 1 2 0 2 0 0 1.5 CREDIT: NO CREDIT CAPTION: A FORTUNE PROBABILITY PANEL BIOTECHNOLOGY & MEDICINE The medical experts give an AIDS vaccine by the year 2000 less than an even chance, but quicker diagnosis and better treatment should limit damage from heart attacks. DESCRIPTION: See above.

CHART: TEN EXPERTS CONSENSUS Magnets 5 7 8 4 7 7 7 6 1 7 5.9 Motors and generators 5 7 7 6 7 7 8 5 0 5 5.7 Energy storage 4 7 4 4 8 4 4 5 0 5 4.5 Power transmission 4 2 4 5 2 4 5 4 0 5 3.5 Levitating transportation 4 2 6 2 1 2 2 2 0 2 2.3 CREDIT: NO CREDIT CAPTION: FORTUNE PROBABILITY PANEL SUPERCONDUCTIVITY These experts think the technology is likely to improve magnets and motors, but doubt that such things as magnetically levitating trains will soon be a commercial reality. DESCRIPTION: See above.