New Century Products

Computing microprocessors are all around us - embedded in phones, appliances and cars. The late Mark Weiser, a scientist at Xerox Corp.'s progressive [/URL]Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) is said to be the first major researcher to document this so-called "Ubiquitous Computing,"(also called "ubicomp" or "pervasive computing"). Ubiquitous computing conceptualizes a "third wave" of human-computer interaction. As described by Weiser:

"First were mainframes, each shared by lots of people. Now we are in the personal computing era, person and machine staring uneasily at each other across the desktop. Next comes ubiquitous computing, or the age of calm technology, when technology recedes into the background of our lives."

Computers will become even more pervasive in the years to come (click here for a list of ubicomp labs) , with developments in RFID "smart labels" used in retail packaging, and in nanotechnology - creating molecular-level circuitry. Of course, electronic privacy advocates foresee the potential for abuse. But the positive aspects of ubicomp outweigh the bad: Who wouldn't want an RFID tag on their child's backpack, emitting a signal with the tyke's exact location, and read on a dash-mounted GPS device in your family mini-van? Wouldn't it be nice on a trip to a developing country to carry a drinking cup equipped with sensors that detect pathogens in the water before you drink?

I think the very nature of the New Century Products project mandates the inclusion of the World Wide Web as New Century Product #1. When I was a kid back in the 1970's, if someone had asked me if by the year 2000 there would be a worldwide computer network permitting the lightspeed transfer of text, graphics, and sound - I would have answered without hesitation - "heck yes!!" The Web is at least one example of where the year 2000 did not disappoint. (An example of fin-de-siecle disappointment is no operational Moonbase Alpha as seen on the 70's T.V. show Space 1999.

Indeed, the Web is a fulfillment of Vannevar Bush's Memex vision, and is closely analogous to H.G. Wells' World Brain concept. Although the Internet was around well before Tim Berners-Lee developed the Web at CERN, using the Telnet protocol on the Internet still required command prompt-level knowledge of UNIX. Well, most people were just plain grossed out by the 'ol command prompt. (I'm an old MS-DOS user - I never minded it.) So, using the pre-Web Internet would have remained a niche, techno-academic pursuit, but for the invention of HTTP, HTML, and Web browser software.

Now the Web is used by millions of people worldwide for, among many uses, distance learning, searching library catalogs, or just networking with friends. The Web's growth (in just over 10 years) is unparalleled in the history of science and technology. The Web's future applications and connectivity possibilities remain bright, but only if major governance and security problems are resolved.