Home computers get the finger

In the eighties the battle for the home computer market was alive with interesting contenders like BBC Micro, Acorn Electron, Commodore 64, ZX and Spectrum all competed for market share. None of these computers shared architecture, processor instructions or languages, mostly the only thing they shared was the keyboard layout! None of this mattered as the age of the enthusiast had begun, and people across the world began making their own programs (mostly games). Computing had come home

This first generation evolved into more powerful machines such as the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST which began to bring more variety to computing applications used in the home. I remember playing with Octomed when I was 18, making dance music from some basic beats and bleeps! Alongside this, was the advances in games consoles. Starting with the bat and ball paddle games, then onto the Atari console generations, Nintendo and Sega's first LCD handheld games, then the evolution onwards and upwards. As gaming moved more towards consoles and as advances in the world of business computing brought forward the first “Desktop” personal computer that crossed over into the home. The x86 IBM PC was born. This computer swept away the competition. It had expandable and replaceable hardware, with a revolutionary internal hard disk and a flexible os (Disk Operating System) that could adapt to hardware changes and allow installation of new complex software that allowed the creation of all sorts of complex content. And so the battle was over and the war was one and peace reigned for the next decade or more. This meant the home computer market hardly changed. Long live the new and boring King.

In the late Nineties, early 2000’s there were 2 significant developments, the internet became widely available and mobile communications exploded. Both these technologies followed the Gartner hype-cycle, and have taken root and matured. These technologies have given rise to new markets and new developments that are causing the current revolution that to me looks similar to the initial gold rush of the eighties.

This revolution has been building for the past 6 or so years. Mobile phones, mp3 players, digital cameras, increased bandwidth, small cheap storage, smaller batteries, cheap lcd’s, advances in touch screens, all this has come together into the lovely smart phones we use today. In addition to this, the face of pc’s and laptops have also changed. People no longer view pc’s as a thing on a desk in a room of the house that does everything. Who really uses a home PC for writing letters or doing spread sheets? Things like netbooks and net pc’s have whittled a pc down to a reduced set of use cases that cover the needs of most home users, while cloud services can provide document creation in the few occasions a letter needs writing. No longer are x86 and Microsoft the only game in town, in fact the old windows OS is really looking rather, well, old. We are moving away from conventional computers. Mobiles and computers are merging, the rulebook as been ripped up and once again innovation is changing the ways we interact with the digital world. I really like it. For a long time I have watched tablet devices evolve as a backwater technology. Motion computing has been in this space for ages, windows tablet has to date been a bit of a sideshow and Wacoms groovy input devices are well, groovy, but while these are all exquisite gadgets, they have always been expensive with specialist uses. I am glad to see that now touchy greatness is crossing over to the mainstream. There is something fundamentally right about prodding the computer withe your finger and using gestures to control applications. Finger friendly OS’s are being honed and there are several viable devices and operating systems offering alternate takes. iPads, Kindles, Gingerbread tablets and Windows Tablets. One only has to look around to see people prodding and poking devices in all sorts of situations. NOW, add to this the really exciting sci-fi style developments that exist today in 3D, augmented reality, ubiquitous computing, cloud services, and the even further afield quantum computing and cryptography, terabyte fibre networks, digital paper, nano tech and intelligence being built into everything and things really start looking really really exciting…. The next 10 years will be amazing for technology, get involved…