March 2001, Vol. 12, No. 3
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Eight years and two months ago -- when the World-Wide Web was still mostly a gleam in Tim Berner-Lee’s eye -- this august journal devoted its cover and its lead editorial position to discussing theconcept of portable computing devices that could retrieve news -- presumably from newspapers -- over the ether. Though no concrete prediction was made, in reviewing the copy it is clear that the writer (me) thought it was just months away.
And while we're almost there, we aren't there yet.
Calling the issue "Toys on the bus," (because it was then and is now the general opinion that digital delivery won't really take off until it’s a toy you can carry onto a bus or into the bathroom) we chatted extensively about Apple Computer’s Newton hand-held device and its Personal Interactive Electronics group (Apple PIE -- get it?).
Unfortunately, for us, the Newton turned out to be a bomb (it’s handwriting recognition was never very good) and the other products we touted -- from AT&T, Matsushita, NEC, Sharp and Toshiba -- weren't winners either.
But a technology visionary and a businesswoman down in Silicon Valley did have an idea that did take off -- the Palm Pilot. The Palm has become an extremely popular device that has developed a number of spin-offs (Handspring Visor) and competitors (Microsoft CE). The one thing that did survive from Apple’s 1992-1993 foray into hand-held devices was the acronym PDA -- personal digital assistant.
Today, for less than $500, you can purchase a PDA that will give you not only calendars, to-do lists and contact databases, but can also bring you news, via e-mail or a small, cramped kind of web page. For a similar amount, you can get a "web-enabled" cellular phone that provides essentially the same services, plus the ability to talk to your ever-lovin'.
And while we bandy about the term "convergence" a lot here -- to mean print, on-line, radio and television converging -- the real convergence is going to be in PDAs and cellular phones converging into new devices (hey, they could be called "knowledge navigators" and then another Apple-ism of the ’80s and ’90s can be preserved).
Inside, we look at a raft of technologies and technologists who are on the forefront of the wireless wonders:
What the last eight years and two months have shown us -- if nothing else -- is that technology is like a football: it can take an unexpected bounce. In 1993 the idea of videotex still loomed large in the minds of publishing technologists and editors; in 2001, we can barely remember those times.
But the hallmark of the videotex era was a lot of money spent with little result; remember the Knight Ridder Viewtron experiment? They say that $50 million (in 1985 dollars, which would be closer to $137 million today) was lost on that one.
While nobody is making money on the wireless wonders today, it probably won't be eight years before all the pieces fall into place to make wireless as ubiquitous as the Web is today.
-- David M. Cole, dmc@colepapers.net
Illustration: Joe Shoulak
From THE COLE PAPERS, March 2001, Copyright © 2001, All Rights Reserved.