Review of Mark Weiser’s The Computer for the 21st Century

03Mar10

Summary

Starting with the famous sentence, “the most profound technologies are those that disappear”, the author brought writing technology as an example. Writing technology is an ability to capture the symbolic description of spoken languages that can help to overcome the limits of individual memory and move toward long-term information freed from storage.

In this paper, the author located the state of 1991‘s computing technology was similar to that of writing technology when the writing requires scribes to know how to make ink and burn clay when they want write something. As well, 1991‘s knowledge navigators such as laptop could not realize integral, invisible environment. Here, the author’s point of view is that disappearance is a consequence of human psychology rather than technology improvement, which means invisibility doesn’t represent vanish of device, and does represent vanish of complex steps to achieve the goal on using the device. The author seems to define ‘free’ as ‘without attention and thinking’ and ‘focus beyond them on new goals’ in whole paper. What is the meaning of invisible, fading into background? It could be realized when the user achieve his/her ultimate goal though he/she doesn’t give careful attention on the system details.

The author was skeptical about virtual reality and mentioned about embodied virtuality which draws computers out of electronic shells. He said, as location-aware and more-interconnected computing system with a little existing artificial intelligence technologies, embodied virtuality could bring us invisible computing.

There are 3 types of prototypes the author suggested as the components of embodied virtuality, tab, pad, and board, which were characterized by its display size. 3 types of components are interconnected so that user could do tasks freed to location. Tabs were the smallest components among them, which could represent individual’s characteristics as badges or ID cards.

The second prototype device was Pad. The author said pads are “something of a cross between a sheet of paper and current laptop computers.” Using pads, users spread them on the real desk or table and do their tasks independent from the display desktop in traditional windows system does.

Boards were yard-sized component used as bulletin boards or whiteboards. Also, users could download books or any information from it into their pads or tabs. To achieve this kind of component, large-size display was needed.

M. Weiser mentioned three technology required: “cheap, low-power computers with convenient displays, tied network, and software systems implementing ubiquitous applications.” He expected these requirements are fulfilled in the future, with specific numerical quantities. Actually, most of his expectations are realized or overachieved year 2010 today, except the software system to implement ubiquitous applications are ongoing issue.

Discussion

M. Weiser categorized the components by its size of screen. In different way, they might be categorized by its ownership, personal and infrastructural devices. Personal hand-held devices including  laptops and net-books had succeed greatly. Recently, with iPhone’s lead, smart phone market was grown significantly. Including iPad, a note-sized tablet device which Apple has recently released, the personal-owned devices are improved fast and seemed to be enough to realize the environment which M. Weiser mentioned.

Otherwise, infrastructural devices hadn’t improved compared to personal devices. Though there are so many prototypes such as smart office, smart home, etc., yet we only can see them in laboratory or conceptual spaces in expos. Suppose that the iPad is not personal device like as M. Weiser said as Pad in this paper, can it come into our life? I think the reason why infrastructural device cannot be implemented our daily life is that the difficulty of maintenance and lack of investment by massive organizations. Hand-held mobile devices are currently improved and rapidly changing its standards so that it’s hard to prepare public components right now with all cares about future personal components. I think infrastructural way will be naturally issued in near future, at the timing that the personal device technologies are mature and standardized. Consequently, I think we are in Tabs and Pads age. As computer science engineers, we should prepare standard framework to support smooth interconnection between personal and infrastructural components to realize Tabs, Pads, and Boards age.

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