Technology of the Year

By Jerry Pournelle

January 20, 2003

(Technology of the Year :  Page 1 of 1 )

Column 270

It's traditional for my end of the year columns to review past trends and make projections for the future. We'll also have the annual Orchids and Onions parade, and the User's Choice Awards.

The most striking trend of 2002 was that PCs became a commodity. Over a hundred and twenty million PCs are sold each year, every one of them more powerful than the biggest and most powerful mainframes of the 80s; and every year more new PCs are sold than were produced during the entirety of the 1980s. The computer revolution is over, and we won.

New model PCs come out all the time now. They're faster and better and have more features, and they cost less, and no one much cares any more. The old one over in the corner works pretty well. The new ones are amazing. Next year's crop will be even better. They're smaller, faster, cheaper, and more convenient, but that's it: With one exception, there aren't any revolutionary developments.

Tablet PC

The exception is the Tablet PC, which comes pretty close to being the pocket computer that Niven and I postulated in the 1974 novel The Mote in God's Eye: a device you always have with you, that can record nearly anything you want recorded and wirelessly put its data into a central data bank for your retrieval years or decades later; and, being wirelessly connected to everything, puts you in communication with the world (including libraries and really humongous computing power) at need. The Tablet PC that was introduced in 2002 isn't there yet, but it looks to have the potential, and was in my judgment the most significant development of 2002.

Tablet PCs will take a couple of years before they displace both laptops and small PDAs, but I'm betting they'll get there. I doubt there will be a health professional without one by the end of 2004. The Tablet PC gets the Chaos Manor User's Choice as the technology of the year, and my personal thanks to Microsoft for making this happen.

Progress

My Chaos Manor User's Choice Award for operating systems ends in a tie: Windows XP Professional, which is very good indeed—and the Mac OS X which brings usable UNIX to the popular desktop.

 Page 1 of 1