The decade of the 1990s will be marked by greatly expanded communications capabilities, made possible by the merger of the computer and telecommunications industries. We call this the New Computer and Communications Industry (NCCI).
Successfully moving into the era of NCCI depends upon the ability to generate cooperation and set standards among key players in both the computer and telecommunications industries -- two industries with their own set of skills, business practices, cultures and technologies.
How significant will this new industry be? Information is the commodity of power in today's global society, and NCCI will revolutionise how the world sends and receives it. It will empower business people to conduct just-in-time business, making decisions based on information updated by the second. It will, for the first time, untether mobile users from direct cable links to their offices. And it will provide home users with enormous menus of information and entertainment that will bring the world to them, on demand. NCCI will spawn new capabilities in data communications that will affect nearly everyone at their office, at home, or while travelling in between.
So, how will the place of the PC change in the era of the NCCI?
The personal computer has emerged as one of the most effective platforms for information needs in the 90s and beyond, be it demands for global information sharing systems or personal productivity tools which slip into a pocket.
There are basically four categories of uses for PCs today:
Personal Productivity
Entertainment
Messaging
Electronic Meetings
We're all most probably familiar with the first use, personal productivity, which includes word processing, spreadsheets, databases, calendars, and the like. This category is well established, and it is almost synonymous with PCs in people's minds.
Entertainment has crept up as a strong second--a relatively recent phenomenon. When PCs were monochromatic and had very slow graphics, the use of PCs for entertainment was an impossibility. In the last few years, a large number of PCs have come out with color monitors and hardware that allow fast enough graphics to permit decent renditions of games.
Messaging has been a growing application, especially now that networks for resource sharing, print sharing and those types of applications have been put in place.
Finally, electronic meetings will be the stimulus for the growth of the PC industry. This implies the exchange of data, graphics, sound and even full-motion video in a real- time conference.
Increasingly, the PC's focus will be on business communication, including phone integration, data sharing and video conferencing. The desktop will absorb the communications accessories of today into the PC of tomorrow.
NCCI will also mark a change in how people compute and communicate at home. It is important here to recognise that we won't see a complete merging of television and computing, simply because the computer goes in one room (where you pay the bills) and the television goes in another room (where you relax and entertain). However, many of the functions in both those rooms will be quite similar and there will be a preference for a common interface.
This means establishing developing PC-based applications and enhancement products, as well as establishing industry communications standards that will enable the PC, telephone and wireless products to work together more easily.
Today in business, speed is everything. Getting your product to market first requires getting data and facts together so you can make timely decisions. The speed with which companies can make decisions is the differentiator in today's ferocious global competition. Two tools are almost universally used in business offices: the PC and the telephone. What's inside that PC? All those personal productivity applications that are used to create and store the business documents that we deal with today: sales presentations, contracts and inter-office memos.
The other tool, the telephone, is still wonderful because you can pick it up and interact with somebody on a real-time basis. We believe there is a market for a product that brings the telephone and PC together and have recently introduced the ProShare personal conferencing products which we will market in Australia towards the end of this year.
Managing Tomorrow's Information
We continually hear about "the information age" and how a successful business is one which appreciates its information database as a precious company resource.
Recognising this trend, a variety of new tools are emerging to help individuals and enterprises manage information more efficiently.
Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) may well be the bridge that turns computers into a consumer item. Character recognition techniques are improving all the time and extending beyond the Roman alphabet to the pictorial characters used by many Asian languages.
Don't be surprised if your insurance agent visits, armed with a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). He'll compile the insurance contract on the spot and you sign it on-screen. The contract is them immediately transmitted to head office using cellular communications, where the corporate computer processes the document automatically.
Once handwriting can be digitised in a reliable manner, the next logical step is to translate one written language to another. Voice recognition is an even more attractive alternative. Speak into a microphone to issue instructions to your computer and have the PC translate and recite your speech in the recipient's language.
The voice mail systems we have today are a step in that direction and, in many cases, are a complete solution to a communication need. The ability to exchange messages directly in a common language is a great advantage.
Add video to the voice mail systems, and capture the nuances which can alter the meaning of even the most mundane exchange of information. The video mail concept is still in its infancy. Imagine the convenience of using video mail in the same way we use email systems, with all the features of mail boxes, editing, broadcasting and forwarding.
With this host of new applications, the consequences will be more, better, faster, easier communications!
Building the Technology for Tomorrow's PC
The original IBM PC introduced in 1981, was based on the Intel 8086 microprocessor and had 29,000 transistors.
Today, Intel's Pentium processor has 3,100,000 transistors and a corresponding contrast in performance. The Pentium processor provides ample support for the resource-hungry graphics, mathematical and database applications, which are becoming standard features of today's workplace.
Intel has conceptualised a chip which will extend this support to the year 2000. This so-called Intel Micro 2000 will have an astounding 100,000,000 transistors--100 million transistors on a chip measuring one-inch square.
The Intel Micro 2000 will provide the computing power needed to run everything from palmtop computers and "smart home" systems, to supercomputer-class machines that will sit right on the desktop. This chip will deliver between 50-100 times the performance of today's Intel486 microprocessor. The compatibility between generations of Intel microprocessor will be maintained, without detriment to the services required to run 21st century applications.
To fit 100 million transistors on a one-inch chip square chip, transistor size will need to be reduced 25-fold, requiring enormous investments in manufacturing technology. The resulting density, however, when coupled with improvements in package technology, will allow electrical current to be driven through the chip at higher frequency or clock rates.
This has the effect of speeding the rate at which a chip can process instructions, further improving the responsiveness of the computer. Today's microprocessors run at 50 or 60 megahertz. The Micro 2000 chip will probably operate at around 250 MHz.
Microprocessors operating at blinding speed will be useless, however, unless the data to be processed is ready when requested. PCs have short-term data storage facilities, on DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chips, and long term repositories on hard or floppy disk drives based on magnetic recording technology.
A word processing document for example, is stored on hard disk until you "open" it, at which time it is loaded into memory. It stays in memory while you're working on it. When you "save" the document, you're actually copying it from memory back to the hard disk. If you lose power before you save the document, however, you lose all your changes as these memory chips are power-dependent.
Memory chips have relatively large storage capacities for their size and they're inexpensive, but the potential for data loss is a major drawback. Magnetic disks retain their data without power, but are slow to access and subject to accidental deletion and even data corruption.
Technology vendors, including Intel, have been working since the late '80s on a better way to store data. The resulting flash memory technology is considered ideal as it is non-volatile (that is, it doesn't matter if the power goes off), fast, secure and reliable, and offers low-cost per megabyte of data stored.
Intel already incorporates flash memory on its PC network adapter cards. It is also possible to use flash cards as data storage mechanisms for portable computing. These credit card sizes devices simply slip into the industry standards PCMCIA slot found in many of today's portable computers and are self-configuring.
Even with processing and local data storage needs, no PC can operate in isolation of its input and output devices. Colour monitors, printers, modems, scanners and other peripheral devices will become increasingly sophisticated as time goes on, requiring more data to be passed between the device and the PC.
The latest must-have gadget may soon need a helmet with built-in sensors and monitor for your virtual reality applications. Imaging, for instance, will give you a guided tour of your new office before the building foundations are even laid.
In the future, as fibre optic networks, multimedia and video predominate, data bottlenecks could become a major problem. Most PCs today use Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) technology, with a 16-bit wide channel operating at 8 MHz, to move data to and from peripheral devices.
Higher-end machines many use Extended ISA (32 bits at 33 MByte/second transfer rate) or IBM's Micro Channel Architecture (32 bits at 20/40 MByte/second transfer rate). In comparison, the newly-emerging Peripheral Components Interface (PCI) has a 32-bit-wide channel and operates at over 120 Mbyte/second usable throughput equating to workstation-class performance for the PC user.
So, tomorrow's PC will have a super fast processor and efficient communication with peripheral devices. The only remaining consideration is its colour, and green is definitely in.
As you can see, the PC is well equipped to support this information age of ours well into the next century. The computing power is readily available. However, it's up to computer users to intelligently apply it towards enhancing their market competitiveness.
If we successfully meet the challenges if applying these new technologies not only will business be more competitive, but workers will be freed from physical boundaries and locations, and our work and home lives will be enhanced.
In summary: in the office of the near future, desktop communications accessories will be consolidated into high- powered PCs providing easy-to-use, powerful communications capabilities to more people, empowering them to easily access to real-time information, send messages and hold real-time data, voice and video conferences.
In the mobile arena, computer users will have a whole new array of communicating capabilities, with the same level of freedom and ease-of-use available to users of cellular phones.
In the home, entertainment will be delivered to the television through set-top devices. Additionally, there will be access to corporate networks, boosting home productivity and blurring the distinction between home and office.
It will truly be an exciting frontier!!
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