************************************* * * * DB/C Newsletter * * June 2002 * * * ************************************* News and Comments Although forecasting the future is a dismal art, in this month's article we'll try to look into the computer industry crystal ball to divine what's coming. In past issues of this newsletter, we've made such predictions with varying levels of success. Hopefully, this month's article about new user interfaces will be one of our more prescient prognostications. DB/C FS 3.1 is still not quite fully cooked! It should be released very soon now. don.wills@dbcsoftware.com ****************************************************************************** New Computer User Interfaces Looking back, the rate of change of computer-based technologies from about 1965 to 1995 was astounding. Computer hardware, operating systems, and user interfaces improved dramatically during this time frame. Hardware that cost millions of dollars in 1970 can now be purchased for hundreds of dollars. And the user interface to the computer has changed radically from punched cards to screen/keyboard/mouse-based graphical user interfaces. The high rate of improvement in computer hardware continues today. Yearly improvements in CPU speed, random-access memory, and disk size and speed are dramatic. It appears that Moore's law will continue to be valid for at least the next eight to ten years. In contrast, the rate of advancement of software-based technologies has slowed in the last few years. While the Internet has allowed our computers to be connected in a world-wide area network (WWAN!), the essential operating system and user interface experience hasn't changed much in the last ten years. File systems haven't changed much in 20 years. The keyboard hasn't changed much in 30 years. And the mouse, a relatively new invention, came into general use about 18 years ago on Apple computers and about ten years ago on Windows. The most important software advances in recent years have been in computer graphics rendering - games. However, most of the improvement in this area is because of availability of fast graphics acceleration chips, not in the software algorithms or user interface. The movie "Minority Report" by Steven Spielberg is a science-fiction story that is set in the year 2054. The movie has plenty of futuristic techno-gadgets. Except for the spiders (see the movie!), the most interesting technology in the movie is the hand-movement-based user interface to a large (about 3 by 5 meters) freestanding transparent (glass) screen on which images are displayed. Instead of using a mouse and keyboard, Tom Cruise just moves his fingers, hands and arms to manipulate what's on the screen. I particularly liked the movement he made to dispose of all images on the screen - it was similar to the movement you make with both arms to clear a table of everything on it. Back to the point of the article - the computer user interface is due for a major revision. Aided by fast processors, wireless hardware and pattern recognition software technologies are maturing to the point that today's hardwired (Ethernet) PCs with keyboard/mouse/screen interfaces will begin to be replaced by more portable interfaces. Wireless technologies will contribute to these changes. Specifically, the 802.1x family of wireless technologies appears to be the successor to hardwired Ethernet connectivity. The 802.11b infrastructure is available today in tens of thousands of offices and retail locations around the world. It will grow dramatically over the next couple of years. We will literally all be swimming in a digital ocean of connectivity. The user interface to the computer/network will change dramatically for mobile users in the digital ocean. Carrying around a keyboard/mouse/screen (a laptop computer) will become as obsolete as carrying around a box of punched cards. In the US, we're seeing an early implementation of a new user interface with the industrial-strength tablet computer that each UPS delivery person carries while making pickups and deliveries. Although the Apple Macintosh isn't used much in business other than for graphics design and video production, its technologies tend to be predictors of things to come in the PC and UNIX worlds. In the last few years, Apple introduced USB ports, Firewire (IEEE 1394), and AirPort (802.11b or WiFi) many months before the general availability in the PC world. Apple is expected to soon introduce computers that come with a built-in handwriting-recognition technology named Inkwell. In a speech at COMDEX last November, Bill Gates unveiled the Microsoft Tablet PC. Gates predicted that the Tablet PC would become the most popular form of PC within five years. Here's Microsoft's press release about Gates' speech: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2001/nov01/11-11comdex2001keynotepr.asp Recently, several manufacturers have announced that they will begin selling their licensed versions of the Microsoft Tablet PC on November 7 of this year. Although many will miss their good old QWERTY keyboards, chances appear good that one or more new computer user interfaces will supplant the old in the next few years. ****************************************************************************** DB/C DX Class Schedule Class: DB/C DX Fundamentals Date: September 2002 Location: Oak Brook, Illinois For information, send email to admin@dbcsoftware.com. ****************************************************************************** Subscribing to the DB/C Newsletter If you don't already have the DB/C Newsletter delivered to your email address and would like to have it emailed to you monthly, just send an email message to 'dbcnews-subscribe@dbcsoftware.com'. The newsletter will be delivered to the email address from which the message was sent.