MDC.WAYNE%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA (Wayne McGuire) (03/20/85)
It's become apparent in recent weeks that the bottom has fallen
out of the home computer market. Whether the collapse in demand for
home computers will equal in severity the videogame bust of a few
years ago is still an open question, but that possibility must be
taken into account.
A column by Fred D'Ignazio in the April Compute! suggests what
is required before home computers become as common as the telephone:
namely, the massive and seamless integration of a number of
technologies--videodiscs, optical fibers, expert systems, portable
laptop computers, speech recognition, videotex, the Integrated
Services Digital Network (ISDN), integrated software, artificial
intelligence, satellite communications, speech synthesis, natural
language understanding, television, telephony, etc.
D'Ignazio argues that as powerful as the new generation of micros
appears compared to what was available a few years ago, microcomputer
technology, and its Worldnet environment, will have to improve by many
orders of magnitude before micros become an appliance for the masses.
He may have a point:
From Compute!, April 1985, pp. 138-140:
Experts predict that a real home computer will not appear until
computers are integrated into all aspects of people's lives, including
banking, shopping, working, communicating, and entertainment. A real
home computer will not sit alone on a desktop and look like a
typewriter plugged into a TV set. Instead, it will be a hybrid
machine--part TV, part telephone, part videocassette recorder, and
part stereo system. It will be the brains of a general-purpose
digital utility center that a family operates to hear music, watch
movies and TV, make phone calls, control household appliances, and pay
bills.
The home computer of the present is made up of awkward,
ill-fitted, and confusing components. The day its components fuse
together into a single digital utility center that is sold at discount
supermarkets, it will truly become a mass-market device.
The digital utility center will come in a single box and plug
into the wall with a single cord. The center's audio, video, and
computer software will be uniform and standardized (in some kind of
optical or magnetic format), and will play everything--from
educational games to Bruce Springsteen to the latest Burt Reynolds
movie.
All the recordings will be digital and capable of being stored on
a single, high-density storage device. All programming will be in
English and will consist of making simple choices from a menu of
selections that appears on a screen and are read to the user aloud by
the center's synthesized voice. Input will be from a keyboard, light
pen, mouse, microphone, or touch screen, depending on the individual's
preference. No technical knowledge whatsoever will be needed to
operate the center. And the center will come with one- to five-year
warranties, full service contracts, and modular, replaceable parts.
When the digital utility center arrives, the home computer will
really be a mass-market appliance. But when computers have become
digital utility centers, they will no longer be computers. To
paraphrase Joseph Weizenbaum, a digital utility center to a computer
is the same as a vacuum cleaner to an electric motor.
Before we see consumers going wild over digital utility centers,
a lot of separate developments have to take place. Audio, video,
communications, and computer hardware must evolve much further and
become more integrated, digital, compatible and inexpensive. Software
for the separate devices has to be integrated under a single
multimedia operating system and has to adopt a standardized storage
and data interchange format.
In addition, the software must have a friendly, human-like
mouthpiece that deals with us in our natural, spoken language and is
not only user-friendly but also user-forgiving. The software will
have to fill in the gaps in people's commands, correct their typos and
misspellings, not let them make any serious mistakes, hold their hand
as they work their way through a task, and anticipate what they will
want to do next.
Most important of all, a mass-market home computer will require a
reliable, universal communications network that links the digital
utility center into very-high-speed satellite channels that support
two-way instantaneous transmission of voices, music, video images,
computer-generated pictures, text, and numerical data. This network,
too, must be standardized, instantly available at the push of a CALL
button on the digital utility center, and invisible to the user.
Only when such a network is in place will the digital utility
center become popular with a majority of consumers. Only then will
all the pie-in-the-sky promises of computer enthusiasts become
possible.
Such a network will make it possible to do home banking,
telecommuting, shopping at home, and attending courses and classes at
home. People will be able to purchase all the new records, movies,
computer software, and books over the network and have them downloaded
into into their local mass-storage device or into a portable computer
that they can detach from the main unit and carry with them when they
travel.
The lesson in all this is that our vision of the home computer
has been too limited, and that's why we keep having false starts. Our
vision has been limited by the fact that we are still too close to the
computer's birth; we are still too familiar with the computer's early
stages and functions to see what it may ultimately become.
We are only now beginning to move beyond the image of the
computer as a computing engine that juggles numbers and processes
paychecks. But we must go much further. We must see the computer as
only a part of the digital revolution of all human media--voice,
music, art, graphics, film, literature, and so on. As all science,
art, technology, and communications are digitized, the computer
assumes a central role as a translator among the media, and as a
terminal linking human beings to the media and to each other.
The computer should enable the average person to enter
information in any medium (pictures, voice, text, whatever) and
instantly translate it (at the discretion of the person) into any
other medium--or into several different media. It should then enable
the person to send the package to any other person. Likewise, anyone
who uses a computer should have instant access to all media in any
format they wish.
This sounds extremely abstract, so picture the home computer of
the future as the United Nations Building. It will have two major
functions: translator and terminal. It will house all the disparate
streams of digitized information representing all the different media,
and it will translate them back and forth at the needs and whims of
the user. And it will be plugged into the outside world (of cultures,
peoples, nations, and institutions) and capable of vital two-way
communication with that world in any language that is appropriate.
-------rpw3@redwood.UUCP (Rob Warnock) (03/22/85)
For an interesting look at some of the implications of a fully-digital
society, see John Brunner's novel, "The Shockwave Rider" (Ballantine 1975).
Brunner calls the "home digital utility center" a "terminal", but clearly
it has much of the social/personal role as the "utility center".
His speculations of the damage that could be done by someone "out to get you"
in such a world are, well, chilling to say the least. Consider what happens
if your credit rating (and hence your availability of services such as light,
heat, phone, computing) were suddenly AND IMMEDIATELY altered downwards. There
is a scene in which such a spiteful person uses a stolen log-in to get at our
hero, who wakes up in the dark, cold, with no phone, and with his blower-
inflated bubble home collapsing about him.
This novel also introduced the notion of "tapeworm" programs (more than
"viruses") which crawl through the net collecting bits of data (and
capabilities or "authorization codes"), thus adding segments to the
growing "worm".
O.k., so it's one of my favorite books... ;-}
(See also Shoch & Hupp, "The 'Worm' Programs -- Early Experience with
a Distributed Computation", CACM, March 1982.)
Rob Warnock
Systems Architecture Consultant
UUCP: {ihnp4,ucbvax!dual}!fortune!redwood!rpw3
DDD: (415)572-2607
USPS: 510 Trinidad Lane, Foster City, CA 94404