I JOINED MY FIRST computer crusade as a systems programming student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1965. There have been many crusades since then.

In this final episode of From the Ether, I'll return to a crusade for which we are now only stacking our lances: Anticiparallelism.

In the 1960s, punched-card batch-processing mainframes were defended by IBM and the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell). I joined the encircling crusaders: Digital Equipment, Data General, and Scientific Data Systems. Our siege machines were interactive time-shared minicomputers.

In the 1970s, with teletypes on the rise, I defected to the personal computing crusades at Xerox, later Apple and Sun, and eventually IBM, Intel, and Microsoft.

In the 1980s, I led the Ethernet crusade. 3Com and Novell took up LANs against stand-alone PCs and their defenders -- including Microsoft -- for whom sneakernet and RS-232C were then quite enough.

And then in 1986 or so, Senator Al Gore "took the initiative in creating the Internet," our current crusade -- led since by Vint Cerf, Sun, and Cisco.

Actually, the Internet has been its own series of crusades since 1969: remote log-in, file transfer, e-mail, newsgroups, client/server, instant messaging, Web publishing, push, Web commerce, streaming media, mobile, peer-to-peer, and soon broadcasting Web entertainment.

Among my favorite current crusades is the all-optical Internet; with fibers extending to the curb, to the home, and not soon enough, to the wall. Fiber crusaders are thwarted for now by the powerful copper monopolies.

Another favorite is the Pay-As-We-Go Internet. Too many still think they'll get for free, or for some low flat fee, all they desire in Internet access, transport, services, and content.

And then there's the crusade for a secure Internet. Today's Internet is anonymous to the bone. But anonymity must be the exception. And as soon as we dethrone the encryption-controlling Clinton-Gores, communications on the Internet should be strongly encrypted all the time.

Not to tilt at windmills, there's also Anticiparallelism, a crusade of mine you probably don't recall from 1998. But I've just met someone actually working on Anticiparallelism -- at Microsoft, no less.

Anticiparallelism is, in short, using idle resources to preprocess anticipated computing tasks in parallel with current tasks. It's doing this automatically, using pervasive, fine-grained, decision analysis in new applications, user interfaces, programming languages, operating systems, and hardware.

Here are some nitty-gritty examples of problems that Anticiparallelism might solve.

Start: What is your computer doing those first minutes after you start it up? It has been idle for hours. It will be idle for much of the time thereafter. So why doesn't it handle its duties before or after starting up?

Next: Why does linking to Web pages, especially the obvious next page, take your computer so completely by surprise?

Back: When you hit your browser's back button, why doesn't your computer have your previous page cached?

Reply: Why must your computer format and send your reply to the current message before fetching and rendering your next in-box message? Why aren't the sending of your last reply and the fetching of

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