Australian: FORMER US Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan observed in his recent biography that the information technology boom of the 1990s was not an overnight phenomenon, but rather the convergence of technologies developed over the preceding 40 years. The evolution of transistors, fibre optics, microchips and satellites coalesced to make the internet work and radically improve the productivity of people performing so many basic tasks. It underwrote sustained economic growth for a decade. …