- Vision1: the Memex
- Vannevar Bush's 1945 Atlantic Monthly article, "As We May Think".
-
Vision2: Wearable Computing - a more recent study of wearables and the
underlying technology requirements (SW Depp and others, IBM, 1997-8).
-
Vision3: The concept car
- To Sun and JavaSoft, a car is just another network...
-
Vision4: Bluetooth makes life easier
- Technology 1: Silicon
Technology until 2010 and beyond - The Semiconductor Industry Association's
2001 edition of their biennial industry plan for the future. The executive
summary is cached locally. For the entire document and earlier versions, goto
the ITRS website.
- Technology 1a:
Scaling of MOS logic and memory - Is Moore's Law a consequence of the
physics of ever-smaller devices? Actually, no, as a history of device geometry
and field scaling shows. Instead, it has been
a constant struggle to achieve performance without unacceptable power
requirements.
- Technology
2: Magnetic Storage - Dave Thompson and John Best in the IBM Journal of
Research and Development.
- Technology 3:
Batteries - a modelling study of various options, from CMU. Also, let's
not forget alternatives, from the obvious -- solar
power -- to the more speculative, such as deriving power from the
user directly.
- Technology 4:
Power Management - A pretty thorough overview of display, storage, logic,
memory and communications requirements in a laptop. The numbers are a bit
dated, but all these components continue to consume power and must be budgeted.
- Technology
5: Location awareness. The first article catalogs many approaches to determining
the absolute or relative location of an object. The
second describes a workflow application tracking location in a biotech
lab, with the software issues involved
in successful implementation. GPS is not the only tracking technology. Consider
ultrasonics, or
even cellphone transmissions. Here are
a presentation and an article on
combining GPS with cellphone network localization to make a system stronger
than either one alone.
- Technology 6:
Automatic Speech Recognition: An excellent overview of today's canonical
methods of decoding continuous speech. Note the order of magnitude difference
that still exists between human and machine performance.
-
Technology 7: Wireless Connections: - Radio
innovations and extensions to the MAC layer protocols are required to
solve the "last meter"
problem. BlueTooth
is close, but not widely in use, yet. And efforts continue to further increase
wireless bandwidth and lower
wireless cell size.
- Technology
8: Service Discovery: - View from the Salutation Consortium of how small
computing devices will discover available services, form adhoc networks, and
negotiate for what they need.
