The Future of Computers...

Like, Is There One?

Converse/#a51

So you've seen the title, and you will probably ask, oooh an article about the future of computers, of course there's a future. Then I would answer, shut up you moron, read on and stop butting in.

Computers, they've been around in one form or another for over a hundred years, first in the form of a load of cogs, namely Babbage's novel idea of a clockwork "calculator".

Computers have come an incredibly long way since then, but how much further is there to go? Computers as we know them, a grey box with a quality little monitor next to 'em, are almost certainly going to change enormously. Now although most of us have realised this for a while, we probably picture our grey boxes being so advanced in the future, maybe with a 3D arena, life like graphics, holograms rather than screens, incredibly fast net access. Although this could be the case, my thoughts on future computing are rather different, the early signs of the death of the Personal Computer are creeping about now.

Computers in the past have been predominantly owned by geeks or computer fanatics or youngsters playing games doing a bit of school work and maybe doing a little something creative, but in the past couple of years, this has changed, especially since the internet became such a big buzzword.

The electronics & computing industry is now being driven by the masses, that is, the average middle aged person, who has hardly any interest in computers, they just want to send email, get some information from the web, maybe download a bit of music, buy something online, and of course the casual gamesplayer.

Currently the best way of doing this is with your PC as most of us do this day, but why use a PC? In the future, in my humble opinion the PC will be gone, all storage and even most processing will be done via the internet. Imagine in your living room only having a special TV, this TV would link to the internet, where your own storage space would be on the internet, your processor would be with your storage in some huge building, say, in London or something. This would work much in the way Unix does, only on a much larger scale and far more advanced and powerful.

Think about it, no need to install an OS, no technical worries, nobody spending long nights trying to figure out a PC's problem, just switch on your TV, maybe enter your username and password, and voila, a processing and mass storage house would do it all, and send the information backwards and forwards via a satellite or optical cabling or whatever is around in the future. To access your TV and log in, maybe there will be personal ID cards, sort of bank cards we have today, these would identify us and once giving a PIN would log us in.

Going out to buy something? Fine, take the same card with you, swipe it, debit your account that way, much the same as switch/credit cards these days.

So there's so much that can improve and come together, not to mention the mobile technologies there are today to take your computing with you, on the move.

I'm sure we've all had our own similar views as above too, but think about it, where does that leave the PC? Although everything above might seem an advance and so convenient, where does that leave the crowd who have spent so many years mastering PC's, what about those who use their computers to create, like us?

Surely there'll be plenty of software on these wonder TV's? Think about it, WHY would there be? As we went through earlier, the computer market is driven by different people as mentioned before. How many of these people create their own images, make their own music, create magazines, program software?

We would be the minority, sure there'll be some graphics software, but look the way it's going these days, programs just create effects themselves, once click, instant rendered text, one click instant lovely effects, so on these wonder TV's may be some software that does just about everything for you. Even music creation software, look at Ejay series's, sample editors, they do everything for you, they take the fun and creativity out of it, but deliver it to the masses. Let's face it, you don't even have to have 2 braincells to knock something nice to listen to in Ejay, sure some people might have a bit of knack of chucking up the occasional nice mix, but that's probably just pure luck and still doesn't need much input.

Look at programming too, experts have long said computers will program themselves eventually, maybe a long time yet, but they will eventually. You would just tell the computer what you wanted to do, wait a second or two, waheyyy, there's your program, no skill, talent or hard work involved. Quick and easy, anybody could do it, which will be the idea of course, make it so everybody can do it.

So losing the Personal Computer, is it really something to look forward to?

Think about it, it certainly has me worried, I love tinkering with computers, but just using something such as Open on Sky Digibox's, so simple to use, 100's of thousands have signed up to it already, so it already does what 100's of thousands of people want, what happens when more digital convergance comes about, bye bye PC?

I for one certainly hope not.

Think about it and think how it can affect you and everything you've always known.

Are you worried or excited?

Converse/#a51.