The Future of Output

On the horizon are better, cheaper, and larger display screens; higher-fidelity audio using wave-tab e synthesis and three-dimensional sound; and "real-time" video using digital wavelet theory. 3-D technology is bringing three-dimensionality to computer displays and, through VRML software, 3-D "virtual worlds" to users of the World Wide Web.’

As you might guess, the output hardware we've described so far is becoming more and more sophisticated. Let's consider what's coming into view.

Display Screens: Better & Cheaper

Computer screens are becoming crisper, brighter, bigger, and cheaper. For instance, an LCD monitor from NEC that measures 13 inches from corner to corner now has as high a resolution as a conventional 20-inch monitor, The prices of active-matrix screens are becoming more affordable, and those for passive-matrix screens are lower still.

New plasma technology is being employed to build flat-panel screens as large as 50 inches from corner to corner. Using a technique known as microTeplication, researchers have constructed a thin transparent sheet of plastic prisms that allows builders of portable computer screens to halve the amount of battery power required. Another technique, known as field-emission display (FED), also promises to lower power requirements and to simplify manufacturing of computer screens, thereby lowering the cost. All this is good news in an industry in which screens make up about 40% of a portable computer's cost.

Audio: Higher Fidelity

Generally, points out one technology writer, "the sound wafting from the PC has the crackly ring of grandpa's radio—the one he retired to the attic long ago." Yet users' expectations for microcomputer sound are apt to zoom in 1997, when the DVD will be on the market. The DVD, or CD-size digital video disk, can hold an entire movie with terrific audio.

At present, sounds in a PC are merely approximate. The amount of data from real sound is too much for a microcomputer's microprocessor and con­ventional sound card to handle smoothly and quickly. The next generation of PCs, however, will use a technique known as wave-table synthesis, which is much more realistic than the older method. The wave-table is created, using actual notes played on musical instruments, to form a bank, from which digitally synthesized musical sounds can be drawn on and blended. "The quality of sound you can get from a wave-table is astonishing," says a Yamaha executive. "For a few hundred dollars' worth of add-ons, you can do things on your PC now that 10 years ago musicians in the best studios in the world could not have done."

Sound quality will also be boosted by improvements in amplifiers on sound cards and in speakers. Finally, several companies (SRS Labs, QSound Labs, Spatializer Audio Laboratories) are developing so-called 3-D sound, using just two speakers to give the illusion of three-dimensional sound. Unlike conventional stereo sound, "3-D audio describes an expanded field of sound—a broad arc starting at the left ear and curving around to the right," one writer explains. "In a video game, for example, that means the player could hear an enemy jet fighter approach, take a hit, and explode somewhere off his or her left shoulder." The effect is achieved by boosting certain fre­quencies that provide clues to a sound's location in the room or by varying the timing of sounds from different speakers.

Video: Movie Quality for PCs

Today the movement of most video images displayed on a microcomputer comes across as fuzzy and jerky, with a person's lip movements out of sync with his or her voice. This is because currently available equipment is capa­ble of running only about eight frames a second.

New technology based on digital wavelet theory, a complicated mathe­matical theory, has led to software that can compress digitized pictures into fewer bytes and do it more quickly than current standards. Indeed, the technology can display 30-38 frames a second—"real-time video," giving images the look and feel of a movie. Although this advance has more to do with software than hardware, it will clearly affect future video output. For exam­ple, it will allow two people to easily converse over microcomputer connec­tions in a way that cannot be accomplished easily now.

Three-Dimensional Display

In the 1930s, radiologists tried to create three-dimensional images by hold­ing up two slightly offset X-rays of the same object and crossing their eyes. Now the same effects can be achieved by computers. With 3-D technology, flat, cartoon-like images give way to rounded objects with shadows and tex­tures. Artists can even add "radiosity," so that a dog standing next to a red car, for instance, will pick up a red glow.

During the past several years, many people have come to experience 3-D images not only through random-dot stereograms like the Magic Eye books but also through videogames using virtual-reality head-mounted displays. Now companies are moving beyond VR goggles to design 3-D displays that produce two different eye views without glasses. In one design, for instance, the display remotely senses the viewer's head movements and moves lenses to change the scene presented to each eye.

In early 1994 the Japanese manufacturer Sanyo demonstrated two types of 3-D systems on television screens. One was an experimental 3-D HDTV sys­tem that projected a 120-inch picture on a theater-type screen and required the use of special glasses with polarized lenses. The other, which involved neither HDTV nor special glasses, used what appeared to be a normal 40-inch TV set, with a screen that employed hundreds of tiny prisms/lenses. "The 3-D effect was stunning," wrote one reporter who saw it. "In one scene, water was sprayed from a hose directly at the camera. When watching the replay, I had to control the urge to jump aside."

Virtual Worlds: 3-D in Cyberspace

Virtual reality, as we explained, involves head-mounted displays and data gloves. By contrast, a virtual world requires only a microcomputer, mouse, and special software to display and navigate three-dimensional scenes. The 3-D scenes are presented via interlinked, or networked, computers on the World Wide Web part of the Internet. For example, users can meet in three-dimensional fantasy landscapes (using on-screen stand-ins for themselves called avatars] and move around while "talking" through the keyboard with others.

Virtual worlds are a feat mostly of software rather than output hardware, although the subject deserves discussion here because of the possible trans­formations for output this kind of three-dimensionality promises. Internet sites are rendered in 3-D thanks to software known as VRML, for virtual real­ity markup language (discussed in Chapter 11). To view a site in 3-D, you need to download a piece of software called a VRML browser, such as WebFX or WebSpacc. This enables you to get into 3-D environments such as "Habi­tat/' "AlphaWorld," and "WorldsAway." In WorldsAway, for example, instead of having a text-based "chat room" or discussion group, you appear "live" as your cartoon character avatar in the three-dimensional space. "When you talk, a little balloon appears over your head on the computer screen, containing your words," explains one report. "When you wave, your image waves. . . . Maybe you will go for a walk in the community's virtual woods, with whomever you've befriended online."

Onward

The advances in digitization and refinements in output devices are produc­ing more and more materials in polymedia form. That is, someone's intel­lectual or creative work, whether words, pictures, or animation, may appear in more than one form or medium. For instance, you could be reading this chapter printed in a traditional bound book. Or you might be reading it in a "course pack," printed on paper through some sort of electronic delivery sys­tem. Or it might appear on a computer display screen. Or it could be in mul­timedia form, adding sounds, pictures, and video to text. Thus, information technology changes the nature of how ideas are communicated.

If materials can be input and output in new ways, where will they be stored? That is the subject of the next chapter.

Telling Computer Magazines Apart

Visit a newsstand in an urban or suburban area— even one in a supermarket—and you'll quickly discover there are several popular computer mag­azines. Visit a computer store or bookseller such as B. Dai-ton, and you'll be overwhelmed by the number of such periodicals available. Here we try to explain which publi­cations may be most practical for you.

What You'll Find in Computer Magazines

Nobody needs computer magazines. However, once you find a couple or three you're comfortable with, they can help you keep up on trends, determine what to buy and not buy, and learn things to make your computing tasks easier. Specifically, computer magazines offer the following:

• First looks and reviews: Many periodicals review the lat­est in hardware and software. They thus serve the same purpose as reviewers of books and movies.

However, Russ Walter, author of the annually revised The Secret Guide to Computing, advises "don't take the reviews too seriously: the typical review is written by just one person and reflects just that individual's opinion." Some reviewers are too appreciative, some too critical —about the same product.

• News and rumors: Computer magazines report news and gossip about software and hardware companies, the industry buzz on forthcoming products, and what certain computer celebrities are supposed to be up to. They a so have articles on what users are doing with their technology. San Jose Mercury News computer columnist Phillip Robinson believes that the magazines need lots more of this user coverage, "but it doesn't thrill their advertisers as much as industry news, because it is more likely to include negatives."

• Features and columns: Feature articles deal with how-to topics or think pieces, which are not considered "hard news." Examples are how antivirus utilities work, how main memory can be expanded, what the future of multimedia will be. Columns reflect the opinions of the writ­ers and carry disagreements, predictions, generaliza­tions, or thoughts about trends.

• Ads: Like most magazines, computer periodicals are principally supported by advertisers. Ads can show you the offerings available, yet the advertisers can have a way of indirectly influencing a magazine's coverage. (A magazine devoted to Macintosh, for example, might not be very aggressive in covering flaws in these machines, for fear that Apple might yank its advertising.)

Categories of Magazines

It's worth noting that many daily newspapers print reviews, columns, and feature articles concerning computing and communications, usually in the business section. The New York Times, for instance, regularly prints articles by its com­puter columnist Peter Lewis, and the Wall Street journal does the same with a column by Walter Mossberg. In ad­dition, the magazines Fortune and Business Week provide good news coverage on trends in computing and commu­nications. (Perhaps once a year, the last three publications also publish special issues or sections on key aspects of in­formation technology.) Popular magazines on scientific subjects, such as Technology Review and Popular Science, also publish feature articles on trends in the field.

As for computer magazines, some are published for novices, some are aimed at professionals who buy lots of hardware and software, and some are for users of particu­lar types of microcomputer systems (only Macintoshes or only IBM-compatible computers).

We will describe popular computer publications ac­cording to the following categories:

• Magazines for novices

• Somewhat technical magazines and newspapers

• Magazines for users of IBM PCs and compatibles

• Magazines for users of Macintoshes

• Magazines for users with special interests, such as portable computing, online communications, multime­dia, and desktop publishing

Also note our list of computer periodicals, with contact phone numbers and subscription rates.

Magazines for Novices A number of magazines de­signed for nontechnical users have appeared in recent years, and they have expanded greatly as more computers have moved into the home, constituting a growing market for advertisers. The publications include the following:

• PC Novice: Beneath the title appears the subtitle "per­sonal computers in plain English." For anyone who knows nothing about microcomputers—particularly IBM and IBM-compatibles—this magazine makes o good beginning because everything is explained. Moreover, at 100 or so pages, PC Novice is far easier to get into than other computer magazines, which may run to 400 or even 800 pages (most of them ads). The magazine also runs a glossary in its back pages.

• PC Today: Aimed at "computing for small business/' this sister publication of PC Novice, and a notch above it in difficulty, is designed for the small businessperson who is getting going in computing.

• ComputerLife: Published by Ziff-Davis (one of the two biggest computer magazine conglomerates, the other being IDG), this monthly is "aimed at people who really, really like their computers but regard themselves as non­technical," according to Wall Street journal computer columnist Walter Mossberg. Says Phillip Robinson, ComputerLife "is aimed at computing fun for people al­ready tuned in to CPUs, modems, and the like."

• HomePC: Aimed at every kind of home (that is, with and without children), this monthly publication has reg­ular sections, ranging from do-it-yourself to education to kids' reviews of children's software.

• MacHome journal: Subtitled "for work, play, and edu­cation," this is the only home-oriented magazine for Ap­ple Macintosh owners. Running around 130 pages, it offers reviews of Macintosh products (even citing other magazine reviews alongside their own) as well as news of the latest trends.

• FomilyPC: Published by Ziff-Davis and Walt Disney, FamilyPC is a visually inviting magazine that is de­signed to help parents figure out how to help their chil­dren get the most out of computers. Instead of test labs, the magazine uses panels of kids and parents to evalu­ate products.

In addition, from time to time what the magazine indus­try calls "one-shots" appear on newsstands and are useful for beginners. These are irregularly appearing publications such as Computer Buyer's Guide and Handbook, with vari­ations such as Laptop Buyer's Guide and Printer Buyer's Guide.

Somewhat Technical Magazines & Newspapers

The next level of publication requires that readers have some knowledge of computers and communications—at least as much as will have been achieved by those who have read this far in the book. We are not, however, in­cluding the kinds of scholarly publications available from professional computing and engineering societies.

• Monthly magazines: A recent publishing success story is Wired, which may be considered the Rolling Stone of computer/communications magazines. Not terribly technical, it features wild graphics and layouts and takes an irreverent view of life. "Since each issue of Wired is wild, slick, and expensive," writes Russ Walter, "it's read by the hip rich, so it includes ads for upscale consumer goods such as Jetta cars and Absolut Vodka."

At the other end of the sea e, described as "the Sci­entific American of computing" by Robinson, is Byte, the oldest popular computer magazine. This is probably the best source for finding in-depth explanations of the latest technologies, such as uses of the radio-frequency spec­trum or the concept of plug and play.

Computer Shopper, a monthly monster of 800-plus pages, is billed as "the computer magazine for direct I buyers," and thus it assumes a certain amount of techni­cal knowledge (mainly of IBMs and compatibles}. Be­cause so much of it is advertising from direct sellers of computers, it has the feel of a phonebook-size catalog. It does offer articles of interest to people who follow computers closely, such as "Special Report: CPU Tech­nology."

• Free weekly newspapers: A weekly newspaper pub­lished by IDG is Computer Currents, which is distributed free at certain newsstands and in news racks in six re­gions: Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Other free newspapers are available in selected cities. If you can't get one free, you can subscribe to them.

These newspapers, which hove a microcomputer orientation, offer much the same coverage as is found in magazines and newspapers you would pay for. However, they have the advantage of offering news and listings for local events, as well as carrying local advertising.

• Subscription weeklies: The oldest weekly newspaper covering computers of all types—micros, minis, main­frames, and supers—is IDG's Computerrworld, which began publishing in 1967. Computerworld, which may be found in many college libraries, is intended for com­puter professionals.

Perhaps the principal competition to Computerworld is CMP's Information Week, a slick four-color magazine that is billed as being "for business and technology man­agers." It can be found on newsstands such as those in airports along with other business magazines.

• Controlied-circulation weeklies: Three weekly publica­tions that are more apt to be found in a university library than on a newsstand are Infoworld, PC Week, and MacWeek. The three publications hove good reviews, but they are principally of interest to people who need to follow trends closely and know where information technology is headed.

All three weeklies are "controlled circuation." This means that you can get them free if you complete an ap­plication form successfully enough to assure the publish­ers that you buy sufficient hardware or software to be of interest to advertisers. Otherwise you have to pay $ 1 25 to $1 95 for a yearly subscription.

7. Near & Far Horizons: Processing Power in the Future

On the near horizon are ultra-tiny multimedia superchips, billion-bit memory chips, teraflop supercomputers, stripped-down Internet PCs, and Intercast TV/Internet PCs, On the far horizon are technologies using gallium arsenide, superconducting materials, optical processing, ' nanotechnology, and DMA.

How far we have come. The onboard guidance computer used in 1969 by the Apollo 11 astronauts—who made the first moon landing—-had 2 kilobytes of RAM and 36 kilobytes of ROM, ran at a speed of 1 megahertz, weighed 70 pounds, and required 70 watts of power. Even the Mission Control computer on the ground had only 1 megabyte of memory. "It cost $4 million and took up most of a room," says a space physicist who was there. Today you can easily buy a personal computer with 90 times the processing power and 10 times the memory for just a couple of thousand dollars.

Future Developments: Near Horizons

The old theological question of how many angels could fit on the head of a pin has a modern counterpart: the technological question of how many cir­cuits could fit there. Computer developers are obsessed with speed and power, constantly seeking ways to promote faster processing and more main memory in a smaller area. Some of the most promising directions, already discussed, are RISC chips and parallel processing. Some other research-and-development paths being explored in the near term include the following:

e-tiny multimedia superchips: The general-purpose microprocessor we've described in this chapter, such as Intel's Pentium, is about to be replaced. Several companies (Intel, IBM, MicroUnity, Chromatic Research, Philips) have announced they are working on versions of a new breed of chip called a media processor.

As we stated in Chapter 1, multimedia refers to technology that pre­sents information in more than one medium, including text, graphics, ani­mation, video, music, and voice. A media processor, or so-called "multi­media accelerator," is a chip with a fast processing speed that can do specialized multimedia calculations and handle several multimedia func­tions at once, such as audio, video, and three-dimensional animation.

MicroUnity, for example, is using tricks that will pack perhaps three times as many transistors on a chip as there are on a standard Pentium, which is about the same size. With this process, the company expects to obtain multimedia chips that will operate at 1 billion cycles per second— five times the speed of a 200-megahertz Pentium Pro.

Superior processing speeds arc necessary if the media and communica­tions industries are to realize their visions for such advances as realistic videogame animation and high-quality video phones. An all-digital TV, for instance, needs media processors to perform the calculations for the mil­lion or more dots that make up one frame of video—and 30 such video frames race by each second.

In 1995 two sets of companies—Hitachi and NEC on the one hand, and Motorola, Toshiba, IBM, and Siemens on the other—announced plans to build plants to make memory chips capable of storing 1 billion bits (a gigabit) of data. This is 60 times as much infor­mation as is stored on the DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chips used in today's latest personal computers. One thumbnail-size piece of sil­icon could then store 10 copies of the complete works of Shakespeare, 4 hours of compact-disk quality sound, or 15 minutes of video images. Engi­neering samples of such chips are expected in 1998.

Intel announced in 1995 that it was building a new supercomputer that would be the first to achieve the goal of cal­culating more than a trillion floating-point operations a second, known as a teraflop. Using 9000 Pentium Pro microprocessors in the configuration known as massively parallel processing, the machine would be applied to the study of nuclear weapons safety, among other things.

The reverse of supercomputers is the stripped-down Internet. PC, or "hollow PC". This appliance—built by Oracle and England's Acorn Computer Group—is designed as an inex­pensive device for cruising the Internet and World Wide Web and for doing basic computing.

The Internet PC doesn't have CD-ROM drives and will not be able to use store-bought software (but software applications can presumably be extracted from the Web). It includes 4 megabytes of main memory, a microprocessor similar to that used in Apple Computer's handheld New­ton devices, a keyboard, mouse, and network connections.

A variation being licensed by Apple is Pippin, a game-player Internet connector that plugs into a TV. Expected to cost about $500, Pippin could boost demand for the Macintosh operating system.

* Intercut TV/Internet PC- Another new technology, developed by Intel, is Intercast, which links the Internet and televisions to microcomputers. Intercast allows PCs equipped with modems to receive broadcast data from the Internet as well as television programming. Thus, you could watch a television news show about Bosnia 011 your computer screen and then, if you wished, look up related historical and geographical information broad­cast by the television network.

Future Developments: Far Horizons

Silicon is still king of semiconductor materials, but researchers are pushing on with other approaches. Most of the following, however, will probably take some time to realize:

* A leading contender in chip technology is gallium arsenide, which allows electrical impulses to be transmitted several times faster than silicon can. Gallium arsenide also requires less power than sil­icon chips and can operate at higher temperatures. However, chip design­ers at present are unable to squeeze as many circuits onto a chip as they can with silicon.

* Superconductors Silicon, as we stated, is a semiconductor; Electricity flows through the material with some resistance. This leads to heat buildup and the risk of circuits melting down. A superconductor, by contrast, is material that allows electricity to flow through it without resistance.

Until recently superconductors were considered impractical because they have to be kept at subzero temperatures in order to carry enough cur­rent for many uses. In 1995, however, scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico succeeded in fabricating a high-temperature, flexible, ribbon-like superconducting tape that could carry current at a density of more than 1 million amperes per square centimeter, considered I a sort of threshold for wide practical uses.

While the material is still very cold, it is hot compared to earlier I extremely chilly superconductors. Now, perhaps, superconducting wire will find widespread applications. In computers it could produce circuitry 100 times faster than today's silicon chips.

Today’s computers are electronic; tomor­row's might be op to-electronic-—using light, not electricity. With optical-electronic technology, a machine using lasers, lenses, and mirrors would represent the on-and-off codes of data with pulses of light.

Except in a vacuum, light is faster than electricity. Indeed, fiber-optic networks, which consist of hair-thin glass fibers, can move information at speeds up to 3000 times faster than conventional networks. However, the signals get bogged down when they have to be processed by silicon chips. I Opto-electronic chips would remove that bottleneck.

* Nanotechnology, nanoelectronics, nanostructures, nanofabrication—all start with a measurement known as a nanometer. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, which means we are operating at the level of atoms and molecules. A human hair is approximately 100,000 nanometers in diameter.

Nanotechnology is a science based on using molecules to create tiny machines to hold data or perform tasks. Experts attempt to do "nanofab­rication" by building tiny "nanostructures" one atom or molecule at a time. When applied to chips and other electronic devices, the field is called "nanoelectronics."

Date: 2015-04-20; view: 934