notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

2lmc’s kitchen computer

boncey:

How about this as a use-case [for a tablet].

Attach it to the wall by the front door so I can see how my trains are running and if I need my umbrella as I leave the house in the morning.

Not saying I’d pay $500 for one but it’s certainly something I’ve considered building for my own use.

2lmc had a computer, called spoon, that had a touch screen and sat in the kitchen, showing news headlines, the weather and the state of the Tube. It was sort of nice, but the fact I’ve never bothered to recreate it since seems to imply that the whole “fridge screen” idea isn’t going to be a huge seller. I suppose I could be wrong, but if Apple suggest that’s the use for their $500+ tablet, I’ll be amazed.

The Computer Of 2010

In 2000, Forbes stuck their neck out and predicted what The Computer of 2010 would look like (via, via), complete with a frogdesign illustration:

Specified as a portable device that docks in your work (to a big-ass table) and in your home (“so your house becomes a smart operating system”), the main notable feature of the Computer is that it’s built on optoelectronics, which obviously didn’t really come to pass. Their predictions are otherwise really far more miss than hit.

You’ll communicate with the PC primarily with your voice, putting it truly at your beck and call.

Bill Gates called. He wanted his perpetually wrong prediction back.

by plugging our computer into an office desk, its top becomes a gigantic computer screen—an interactive photonic display. You won’t need a keyboard because files can be opened and closed simply by touching and dragging with your finger. And for those throwbacks who must have a keyboard, we’ve supplied that as well.  A virtual keyboard can be momentarily created on the tabletop, only to disappear when no longer needed. Now you see it, now you don’t.

Well, my iPhone gets by with a virtual keyboard, but that’s going to have to be filed under “mostly wrong”. Unless you know someone who has actually used Microsoft’s Big Ass Table.

The disk will be holographic and will somewhat resemble a CD-ROM or DVD. That is, it will be a spinning, transparent plastic platter with a writing laser on one side and reading laser on the other, and it will hold an astounding terabyte (1 trillion bytes) of data, just a tad more than we get today—1,000 times more, to be exact.

Pretty much spot on for capacity but entirely wrong on tech; hard drives still use magnetic platters, just as they have for the last 30 years.

With such capacity, you’ll be able to store every ounce of information about your life. But beware. If your computer is stolen or destroyed, you might actually start wondering who you are.

You could take backups? Anyway, no mention of digital movies, music, or 12MP RAW files, together making sure that a terabyte still feels far from voluminous.

With communication between components no longer bottlenecked by electronic transmission, we can probably push the [CPU] clock rate to 100 gigahertz, 100 times faster than what’s available now

Oh dear. This is where the opto-electronics wishful thinking really bites. As is:

A long, sticklike lithium battery, bent into a doughnut and installed in the periphery of the computer, will run it for a couple of weeks

More like a few hours? Oh well.

Size does matter in our 2010 computer screen. It will either be very large, literally the desk top of your desktop, or very small, a monocle you hold up to your eye. … Colors will be vivid and images precise (think plasma displays). In fact, today’s concept of “resolution” will be largely obsolete. Get ready for pay-per-view Webcasts.

Screens have got larger and flatter, but not that much. I also don’t see any display monocles (although that would be interesting, if somewhat steampunk). As for “pay-per-view Webcasts”, well, we all know how that one ended up.

All in all, one has to file this under “failed future”. They’d have done better to straight-line Moore’s Law, even though that would have failed to predict the multi-core CPUs.

Unix In Your Pants

Last week I posted about how all the phones I care about were designed in the United States, rather than Europe, Japan or Korea. They’re also not really phones, but computers. They have one other thing in common- they all run Unix.

This really is shocking if you were around in the 1980s, or even the early ’90s, but the inexorable progress of Moore’s Law - combined with clever stripping of the worst bits of the open source Linux GUI, or the most demanding parts of Mac OS X - means that the Android and Pre platforms share with the iPhone a Unix core.

Of course, unlike the dreams of the ultimately failed OpenMoko initiative, all of these devices are more or less locked down. Sure, you can download source for the first two, but until recently neither offered a native code SDK. (Unsurprisingly Apple’s device is even less open.) Nonetheless, deep in the guts of my phone - and probably yours - is an OS written forty years ago for a minicomputer. What a strange industry.