Martin Willett, July 2009
Several years ago I wrote about the future of computing and now it seems as though the future is unfolding rather like I envisioned.
It is still very unclear whether televisions or mobile telephones will ever usurp the dedicated computer for most people. I wrote from a time when the family had one desktop computer, which was regarded by my wife as a bit of a boys' toy, not really something she would be having much to do with. Things have changed dramatically. The computer I was using then is now thoroughly left behind, capable of only the most pedestrian applications, it sits in a literal heap of junk computers, unloved. Its replacement is slightly more powerful but not unbelievably so. It is now several years old but still keeping its head well above water thanks to the maxing out of its memory (up to 2GB from the original 512MB) and the beautiful simplicity of adding new capabilities to it via USB.
It seems these days only gamers chasing the bleeding edge of technology obsess about having something which is faster and more powerful than everybody else. Specs appeal is for teenage boys.
My teenage son does indeed have the highest specification computer device in the household. A very large and shiny laptop that rarely moves beyond the radius of its own power cord. It can be moved around, but mostly it isn't moved. He uses it for watching and making videos for the web, mostly on YouTube. He also has a camcorder with a hard drive in it, one of many devices which blur the lines between what is a computer and what is an ordinary device. My son's camcorder has a hard drive. My own portable computer doesn't. My television set has a hard drive attached to it.
My portable computer is a netbook, a really small and cheap computer designed to be ultralight and to do most of its operations via the web. I rarely connect it to the web. I use it as an ultraportable word processor. The netbook has moved into a different ecological niche. This is the way computing will move in the future, there will not be one evolutionary trend, there will be many trends moving in different directions. Just as there are herbivores and carnivores, scavengers and parasites computers will also take on a number of very different forms and people in advanced societies will come to own several computer devices that will probably never manage to link up quite as much as they do in the imaginations of their designers and promoters.
I have a home network which is used only to give internet access to all the devices that require it, wired access to my desktop PC and wireless access to my netbook (which I often connect via a wire when I'm sat at my desk) plus two laptops and a Nintendo DS. My son hasn't explored the possibilities of hooking up his PS2 to the net, or much of anything except a television set used as a monitor. In a few months all old television sets will become dumb monitors as television transmission goes digital. My main television is a flatscreen LCD device, while at the moment my computer monitor is a cathode ray tube, although a 22 inch TFT will probably be in place in a few months. That is at least one thing I can say, screens will be flat, all of them, but they will come in a huge variety of sizes.
Update October 2010:Good call! I have a Packhard Bell 230WS nominally 23" widescreen monitor now. It seems as big as is reasonable to have as a PC monitor, any bigger and I'd have to move my head to see different bits of the screen! |
It seems that widescreen is here to stay, whether we really want it or not. It makes sense for television to operate in widescreen, it is the ideal shape to take up your whole field of view. However not all screens should take up the whole of your field of view.
Touchscreens offer some possibilities but they must develop from the current technology to become more reliable. My satellite navigation system uses a touchscreen and it works reasonably well in an icon environment on a small screen but my experience of using a touchscreen to operate a PC (at work) has not been very promising. Touchscreens should stay for small devices only, or devices which do not require a lot of user input. There is no substitute for a proper keyboard for rapid input of large quantities of text.
Future computers will probably have a number of storage media: hard drives and solid state devices. The days of the single hard drive are probably behind us. Hard drive technology is very mature now, hard drives are huge, fast and cheap. But hard drives are power hungry and noisy. For several kinds of operation there is a reason to come up with an alternative to the conventional hard drive. One possibility is the use of conventional hard drives but in housings which reduce the sound output. My netbook demonstrates clearly to me that a well-designed device can and should be silent and economical in a device that does not need to run as fast as possible.
Perhaps the days of the flat-out PC are in the past. For most requirements modern computers can cope very well without resorting to formula one type performance, noise and lack of reliability. Playing DVDs, sending email and watching YouTube videos does not require a processor to have turbochargers, fins and multiple radiators. Only boys with performance anxiety need to have a PC that looks like it has got nitrous oxide injection and other “illegal modifications”. What matters online is what you can do with what you've got, not what you own can do to a benchmark. Girls don't care about specifications anyway.
As long as your hardware will run the applications you need it will be powerful enough. Now a large proportion of the most desirable applications do not use the hardware flat out. There has been a move towards usability and playability rather than sheer grunt. It is the Nintendo Wii which is setting the pace with games rather than the Blue Ray pixel mashers. Surely this is a good thing, it's all about what you can do with the stuff rather than how powerful it is in the crudest terms. After all people drive cars today that go as fast as the fast cars of the 1960s, the average man in the street has no need to travel at 250 MPH and is more interested in a car which will be useful, comfortable, economical and capable of carrying people and luggage. It is not about how fast it can go, it is about doing the job right.
The home network is here to stay and it will grow in time. The usefulness of any device is multiplied when it can connect with other devices. Streaming data around the home without wires has been a huge boon. The future will see this trend continuing with networks of devices which communicate via USB, Bluetooth, WiFi and their successor technologies. The price of low power radio transceivers is now trivial in the way that could scarcely have been imagined ten years ago thanks to developments in mobile telephones and the unprecedented economies of scale made possible by making telephones for the whole of humanity. The cost of such technology has dropped so much that it seems the break-even point is around two metres, if the cable is longer than two metres it is probably cheaper to do it with low power radio instead, an idea which seems bizarre to me on some levels and yet it is what we see in the shops. I remember my first scornful look at a cordless mouse thinking it was a ridiculous concept, I now own two.
Update October 2010:I have reverted to a corded mouse, optical, obviously. It's just simpler as it never needs waking up and it never runs out of battery power. |
Bluetooth has been a great advance, making it possible to connect many devices together cheaply, this is surely going to be a trend that continues for devices which do not to send very large amounts of data. However there is probably scope for another low range RF technology to offer greater bandwidths, which may be the backbone of the new home network or possibly alongside it. Bluetooth works for keyboards, audio in real time and for mice but it is pushed to the limits with printers and it runs out of capacity for video. Streaming television signals from your home server or archive device to watch on your portable player in the bathroom or the garden would need something more powerful, the primary home network device.
The much touted idea of network connected domestic appliances has not taken off. Only a tiny handful of domestic refrigerators have any form of internet capability and I anticipate this will remain the case. It may happen that domestic systems may get more interconnected and we gain the capability to phone the in-fridge webcam to see if we need to buy any more milk, but I doubt it. Home alarm systems and CCTV have moved on enormously and they have plummeted in price while increasing in sophistication it is conceivable that the home network will be able to allow telephone and internet log in to allow us to check what is happening in our homes. There could be mouse-sized devices running on rechargeable AAA batteries or with their own sealed cells inside charged by occasionally plugging into a USB hub (the average home will have one in most rooms) which could relay video and sound and detect movement. These could be sat on shelves or slotted into mounts fastened by suction cups, magnets, pins, velcro or double sided tape or mounted onto camera tripod mounts which would also come in a huge range of forms. Of course I am not really predicting the future as much as describing the present for some people, but I anticipate that such technology will become commonplace to the point that people working as domestic cleaners will be seen popping out their mobile phone, browsing to their home network, checking their email, their Facebook and seeing if the cat has shat on the carpet again.
Mobile telephones have transformed the world. Fishermen in open boats four miles from shore are getting information on fish prices before they decide whether to land their catch or cast their nets one more time. This revolution will surely continue to unfold, with people who will be having mobile telephones who don't have electricity or running water. This must increase the pressure for cleaning up politics and making corruption harder to perpetuate.
The telephone is still too small to be really practical as the main way anybody can access the internet and that is unlikely ever to change because of fundamental ergonomic issues, while the technology can be made small screens and keyboards small enough to put into your pocket impose limits. My wife has a phone now which can access the internet and she can and does use it for Facebook. It is also a 5 megapixel camera.
My own phone today is one of my wife's cast-offs. An LG Shine.
I don't want to carry anything significantly bigger or smaller than this and I can't see a way to make a device that size really do wonders on the internet. I am amazed that I can pick up a memory card for it in a supermarket that can contain as much storage capacity as the PC I was using ten years ago, and all that in a size so small that I could keep five or six of them in a matchbox without taking any of the matches out. I use it for taking photographs (it has a good 2 megapixel camera) and for playing MP3s.
Phones are likely to become more specialized. Some will try to have every function, the iPhone route, and so will have to be a little bigger. Some will be specialized as internet and messaging devices, the Blackberry route. Others will be cameras and perhaps eventually HD video camcorders. For other people simplicity will be the key. It will be interesting to see if customers will continue to stand for their PDAs, camcorders and so on to be wired up in such a way as they will not operate unless connected to a telephone service. Maybe in future telephone services will become just one function of a pocket device and no longer its defining purpose.
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Update October 2010:In a world in which it is reasonable to assume that every crowd contains several video cameras and devices able to upload information to the internet can we really expect to live in fear of Big Brother? The modern connected world offers us the chance to fight back against forces of oppression. They may well be watching us with cameras but we are also watching them and we've got them surrounded and outnumbered.
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