Monday, April 8, 2002		On Hardware

The unending IT evolution
Ian Pearson

PEOPLE don't really care about technology itself; the important thing is whether or not it makes their lives easier. Personal digital assistants were launched in a blaze of hype, but they flopped at first because they were heavy and didn't do the job well. Then the palm pilot came out in the late '90s and it was desirable because it made it easier to get at your diary. Now everyone I know has one.

Similarly with digital technology, people don't fundamentally care about the difference between a DVD and a videotape, but they are interested in the extra things they can see on a DVD. The iMac was a powerful step forward because it made it easier for persons to get on the Internet and turned the computer from something you would hide to a gadget you would be proud to show off.

Some of the ways our lives are becoming easier are invisible; there are chips in your washing machine, but you don't know they're there. We tend to fill up the extra time we gain from these innovations, however. No one is going to tell you to take the rest of the day off because the technology allowed you to work twice as fast this morning.

Apple changed personal computing forever in 1984 when it launched Macintosh and introduced the world to the easy-to-use point-and-click graphical user interface (GUI). Around 15 years later, it introduced another innovation, which, while perhaps not so radical, changed PCs all over again. In 1999, the company launched the iMac. Designed by Briton Jonathan Ive, the iMac had translucent colours and sexy curves where the standard PC had beige blandness and boxy angles. It represented the high-water mark of the so-called 'blobject' design aesthetic, which imitated nature's organic curves and textures.

Over the past three years, Apple has begun to rethink the iMac's insides, too. The first models offered nothing you wouldn't have got in a Net-ready PC. That's changed with the new iMacs (in particular the latest flat-screen incarnation), which, with its video and music tools, have been restyled as home-entertainment devices as opposed to home-office tools.

The American military began work on satellite navigation in 1973. Consisting of 24 satellites orbiting the earth and a number of corresponding receivers across the globe, the Global Positioning System (GPS) was up and running 10 years later. During the last decade, this technology began to do things for the rest of us.

Consumer GPS devices will tell you your location and were initially used by sailors and explorers. With the arrival of affordable GPS gadgets, hikers have also benefited from SatNav. Soon mobile phones will be GPS-enabled, so you can get location-specific information. Of course, the same devices will also put Big Brother in your backseat and let the government charge drivers for using roads. But meanwhile, given that disputes over map reading are a major source of relationship discord, with in-car GPS, when you get lost, you can both blame the machine.

Getting wired sounded hep 10 years ago. Now, as most of us contemplate the cable spaghetti hanging out the back of our gadgets, we want something different. We don't want to fiddle with sockets and cables. And we don't have to now, thanks to Wi-Fi. Short for 'wireless fidelity', Wi-Fi is the user-friendly label for 802.11b, a family of technical standards and specifications that enable the transmission of data over a wireless network.

So why is all this jargon important? If you attach a Wi-Fi box to your phone line and kit your laptop out with a transceiver, too, you can access the Net from anywhere in your home. You could even go next door. Put an antenna on your roof, and you'll be able to access it a couple of miles away. And you'll have created a mini-network that your neighbours can use, if you let them.

Wi-Fi advocates insist the technology is the best way to bring broadband Net connections to the whole of Britain and many of them are putting their ideas into practice, creating grassroots local wireless networks here and in the USA.

In 1995, techno-guru Nicholas Negroponte published Being Digital, a book of airy speculation about how we were leaving behind a world dominated by moving atoms (i.e. real stuff) and entering an age centred around shifting bits (of information). Some ideas were snigger-inducing but, to give old Nick his due, in the past five years, the digitising of everything is changing our lives. Digital TVs and radios have yet to reach the mainstream. But digital cameras have, so now you can view your snaps on your PC and decide which ones you like.

Similarly, digital camcorders let you edit home videos on the computer and add special effects. While MP3 files and players like the Rio and the iPod let people consume music in a more flexible way, assembling playlists from their whole music collection. The flexible nature of digital tech may eventually change the kind of media we consume. Think of the current bootleg boom in which bedroom creative mix and mash up wildly clashing tracks. Perhaps re-mixed movies will be next.

The idea behind nanotechnology - controlling individual atoms and molecules to create miniature devices (chips, motors, self-replicating robots that clean up our arteries) - has been around since the '50s. The term itself was coined in 1986, in Eric Drexler's book Engines of Creation. But it's only recently that scientists have begun to make practical advances. Researchers at Glasgow University created a device that can hold a single virus in one position (a virus is 300 times thinner than a human hair).

Scanning, tunnelling microscopes now allow for the manipulation of individual atoms. And last year, Cornell University's Nanotechnology Centre, in New York, succeeded in attaching an inorganic rotor to the biological motor that powers all cells. Why is this significant? In future, the energy generated by the ATP engine could be used to power molecular robots. In other words, the conditions are now in place to make nanotechnology a real science.

The iMac may have helped Apple stay afloat, but Microsoft still rules the computer business, its Windows operating system powering over 90 per cent of all PCs. The most interesting challenge to Bill Gates's dominance over the past decade has come from the Open Source movement, a loose alliance of idealistic programmers who believe software should be open and free.

Open Source is one of the Net's first native political movements. Its great rallying point is Linux (pronounced lee-nucks), a free-operating system released online back in 1991. But for the moment, Linux, though used by millions of geeks around the world, remains a little forbidding for ordinary consumers.

A genuine British technological success story, the ARM chip was a spin-off from the home-grown Acorn computer (a.k.a. the BBC Micro), which, when it appeared in the early '80s, was as good as the machines created by big American companies like IBM and Apple. For reasons that had little to do with pure technology, Acorn didn't achieve the market share it deserved. However, in 1990, Acorn set up ARM Holdings (the letters stand for Acorn Risc Machine), to exploit the advances it had made in chip design. Essentially, ARM designs high-performance, low-power processors that are cheap, fast, easy to manufacture and perfect for the new generation of portable computer devices. Over the past 10 years, ARM Holdings has licensed its designs to Ericsson, Nintendo, Nokia, Sony and Intel, among others.

The past decade saw chips turn up in all sorts of objects, from household appliances to toys. Sometimes, these objects had been smartened up for a purpose (think of in-car computers), though usually all they did was beep and force you to use confusing push-button digital interfaces. In future, embedded chips will come with wireless Net connections that enable them to communicate with each other.

The result, say enthusiasts, will be a responsive environment that looks out for us and meets our needs. Our smart fridges will tell us when the milk's off. Clever cookers will network with the fridge. The question is - will the house be able to clean itself? Maybe James Dyson is working on a smart vac.

Ten years ago, persons were getting excited about virtual reality, a 3D computer-generated world you could supposedly 'immerse' yourself in, and interact with, via clunky helmets and data gloves. VR turned out to be a bit of a non-starter. But computer worlds you can explore via your desktop PC became a reality, thanks to advances in 3D graphics technologies.

In the '80s, 3D computer graphics were confined to powerful, expensive workstations. But as chips got cheaper and powerful, they spread to ordinary desktops, helped on the way by the arrival of 3D graphics accelerators, in particular 3dfx's Voodoo, launched in 1997. By then, users had an appetite for navigating 3D computer worlds, thanks to games like Doom.

Elsewhere, 3D computer graphics were established as an innovative art form by Pixar, whose Toy Story was one of the big hits of 1995. Since then, we've had Shrek and Final Fantasy, but Pixar continues to set the agenda - via dazzlingly real unreal images like the fluttering detailed fur of Sully, the big-hearted bogeyman star of this year's Monsters Inc.

Electronic personal organisers were actually a '80s invention, a product of the Filofax era. British company Psion led the way and continued to make classy devices through the '90s. But it was an American gadget that established the idea of the Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). Launched in 1996, the Palm Pilot was elegant, simple and useful.

It lets you access addresses and phone numbers without struggling with bits of paper and you can hook it up to your computer. Where competing devices used mini-keyboards, the Palm Pilot has a pen-based interface, which is easy to use. Palm's success brought competitors - Psion, Handspring and Microsoft, whose PocketPC operating system ran on powerful hand-held devices like the iPaq. Competition brought new features to the basic PDA - colour screens, e-mail, Web surfing, MP3s.

—ONS