The Current and Future Design of Computers

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    Eniacs (starting 1945)
    Laptops (starting 1981)
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    Computer hardware design has shifted rapidly through the use of numerous technologies in the last fifty years. But no matter the size of the device, they all share basic design elements. To be able to invent and innovate and lead other educators into and through the information age future, educators need to track technology developments in three major areas of the computer system: CPU, memory and I/O (input and output devices).  Staying current with these fourth generation thinking developments will remain an ongoing concern for many years to come.

    The computer hardware and its ROM chips serves as the "first system of operation" without which the software operating system could not function. As the computer is operated one might imagine the insides of the computer as a series of conveyer belts carrying information to and from the CPU (central processing unit). Each of these conveyer belts runs at different speeds because the different components the conveyer belts connect have different capacities. For example memory chips move information around thousands of times faster than the hard drive can move data. Computer network connections generally run even slower than the hard drives, but not always. Speed up the CPU and all the conveyer belts will need an upgrade as well to take advantage of the speed. Consequently, you cannot stick a new CPU in an old computer and have it run faster without changing many other things. This is why it is cheaper and more effective to buy a new computer every couple of years than try and keep upgrading an old one.

    Educators' careers are already tightly integrated with the processing and management of information. Computer technology is a significant component of this knowledge processing advancement. It is then both natural and important that educators follow the trajectory of current and future computer developments closely. Further, if educators communicate their needs and visions well, their ideas will also help lead the development of new computer designs and information processing tools. Since news items come along continuously every year that fit into each of these three categories, educators might challenge their students to make a bulletin board for each of these three areas (CPU, RAM and I/O) with pictures and news of technologies that they discover through the year. As these developments are followed ask students to look for trends in what they are reporting.

    Certain trends will become obvious. From the 1950's onward, several important trends in computer design have been readily visible. The size and cost of computers has been shrinking dramatically. Further, the speed at which computer operations can be completed has been increasingly dramatically. Since the 1990's the third trend, an explosion of computer networking, has become apparent. Some trends move faster than expected, and others, such as computer reliability, move much slower. These trends and others discussed below continue to have an impact on our present and our future.

    Components:

    The CPU

     

    Image courtesy of LBNL
     

    The Central Processing Unit is the center of a computer's operations. The CPU processes collections of bits called bytes. A byte is the number of switches or bits that the CPU can receive from RAM/ROM at one time and consider in its calculations in one operation. Most of today's personal computer CPU's have a 32 bit byte and the computer industry is heading to the 64 bit byte in personal computers (see below).

     The speed at which a computer can carry out its operations is referred to as its megahertz or gigahertz rate. From the 1974 to 2000, most computers were measured by megahertz speeds. A CPU that runs at one megahertz would complete one million operations per second. By the end of the year 2002, 2 gigahertz (2 billion operations per second) systems were common. Higher numbers come out every year. Ever faster systems are being designed. Because other technologies must work with the CPU, computers which are rated with a higher gigahertz rate than others do not necessarily run faster. The best test of a computer's speed is to get out your stop watch and time basic operations such as saving a file or running an animation, then run the same program on a different computer and compare.  It is also possible for many CPU's to share computing responsibilities in one computer. Apple computer no longer sells computers with only one CPU. Soon new computer operating systems will force personal computer buyers to also make decisions about how many CPU's they want in their computer, someday perhaps one for every application they run.

    The fastest computers in the world are not personal computers, but immense collections of computers called supercomputers. The  world's fastest computer in July 2002 was a supercomputer in Yokohama, Japan that ran at over 35 trillion operations per second (35.86 Teraflops) for the Earth Simulator Project which does climate modeling, merging the work of over 5,000 integrated CPUs. On March 24, 2005, the IBM computer called Blue Gene ran at 135.5 Tflops, harnessed over 32,000 sub-computers (nodes), and is designed to reach speeds many times faster than its current world record. More details on this and other supercomputers can be found at the top 500 site. The term supercomputer is a relative term referring to the fastest computers available on the planet in any given year. Numerous pictures of supercomputers are available online. Curiously, these pictures indicate that the room size computer or computer complex has never really gone away. Today's supercomputers still need much of the space and cooling equipment that the original room sized Eniac computer did.

     In spite of their rapid growth in capacity, today's computers based on electrons may one day become the dinosaurs of the early history of computer technology. Think of today's computers as being in the steam engine age of the history of the automobile which came before today's internal combustion engines. The next generation of computers may be based on photons (light beams) and run hundreds of times faster than today's fastest computers. To the best of my knowledge, the patents for photon transistors were first filed in Scotland in 1978. One could surmise from this alone that the next fifty years of central processing unit technology will be as dramatic as the last. 

    Optional reading: 

    • CPU and memory speed (from How Things Work) provides further background information on the nature and variations of CPUs.
    • For additional related readings search for "(CPU OR computer architecture) AND tutorials".


    Computer chip technology continues to become even more sophisticated, adding more features to the chips than just transistors storing ones or zeros. Companies are now developing three dimensional structures on the chips at nanotechnology scale. Nanotechnology involves work with molecular or macromolecular levels in the length scale of approximately 1 - 100 nanometer range (1 billionth of a meter is a nanometer). One application of this capacity would be with drug companies seeking to speed up and drop the cost of research. They would like to run entire sets of research lab procedures on chips using microfluidics.  Microfluidics refers to moving microscopic liquids on chips. In addition to the standard transistors holding ones and zeros, these chips are built in layers which contain miniature valves, pumps and channels that act within a chip as fluidic circuitry. For example, one company called Fluidigm is producing the Live-Cell Microprocessor system which will enable cell biologists to measure real-time changes within live individual cells-essentially, to perform new science. This would enable thousands of tests and experiments to be done per hour per chip. A wide variety of new sensors will also emerge from these developments.

    Central processor chips can already be packaged with the other major computer components so that they are credit card in size or slightly larger. These computers are being designed to work in "grids" of computers, distributing the processing load among members of the grid. Imagine every electrical and electronic device in your home as a member of the grid, all in wireless communication with each other, all able to share their processing capacity with each other. In turn, imagine one desktop computer sized box that might contain dozens of complete cell computers, all sharing computer processing power. Another approach used by computer centers is blade computing. From 20 to 300 cell computers are packed in a rack like blades in a knife rack, hence the name blade computing. This concentrates the number computers that can fit into one space and greatly reduces electrical power and management costs. Link up a cluster of really fast processors and the device becomes a supercomputer. That is, the network is the computer.

    Optional readings: 


    Components: Chips

     

    Image courtesy of NASA

    Computer chips, thumbnail size wafers of silicon or other substances, come in two distinct species, digital and analog. Computers communicate within themselves and with other computers using the digital 1's and 0's. To interact with the world around them they need analog chips that can deal with continuous states of states of information and translate back and forth between discrete the analog and digital environments.

    Digital Chips

    The CPU is a  one kind of digital chips and it has already been discussed. Memory chips make up the second major part of a computer.

    Computer memory contains many digital chips, which contain small switches representing a condition of on or off or a 1 or a 0. Many different techniques and chemical structures are used to make this concept work. Currently computer "chips" made out of silicon are currently used to manage the state of these switches. Silicon is one common substance used to create computer memory, but it was not the first, and is certainly not the last. For example, serious work is being done on using the chemical structure of proteins to create computer memory. Biochips are in your future. 

    Memory: RAM/ROM/EPROM Chips

    Computer chips are designed to serve several different kinds of memory needs. Though RAM and ROM are the most common forms of computer memory chips, there are other forms of which EPROM is one example. 

    • RAM is Dynamic Random Access Memory, also called DRAM. This memory (settings of the switches) is emptied or lost when the electrical power to the computer stops. This referred to as volatile memory. Because your most current computer work is stored in RAM, this is why you lose your most recent typing at the computer when your computer crashes or the electricity goes out.
    • ROM is Read Only Memory. These transistors are placed in specific settings during their manufacture and cannot be erased once they are programmed or loaded with specific instructions. These chips enables your computer to start up or carry specific directions that leave in a state that you can tell it what software to run.
    • EPROM and Flash Memory. EPROM is Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory. These chips allow the user to store data that will not be lost when electrical power to the computer stops, but through various techniques can be quickly erased to start over again. This is known as nonvolatile memory. Flash chips were developed as a more efficient system than EPROM as they can be erased in a flash, yet hold data when the power is off.
    • MRAM is Magnetic Random Access Memory, which uses the magnetic spin of electrons instead of power refreshing to hold the electrical signal of one or zero. This is another form of nonvolatile memory. MRAM designs are new and could appear in products as early as 2004. This will allow: immediate start up without booting software from a hard drive; greatly reduce battery usage; store more data in the same chip space; and provide faster access to data. 


    When purchasing additional RAM for a computer, the computer manual that ships with your computer will tell you which kind you need. These chips might be titled SIMMs or DIMMs chips and new types will emerge. Over the long term RAM prices have dropped steadily, but over a period of months, the price fluctuates considerably in high and low cycles.

    Bytes are discussed in different size units: kilobyte = 1000 bytes (K or KB); megabyte = million bytes (M or MB); gigabyte = billion bytes (GB) ; then terabyte = trillion bytes (TB). This is then followed on up the scale by petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte, and yottabyte. In the near future you will own or use computers with gigabytes of RAM. For someone whose first computer contained 16K of RAM nearly twenty-five years ago, I still find this astonishing.

    Optional Readings: 

    Analog Chips

    Digital circuits have to deal only with the limited range of a one or a zero. An analog circuit must deal with a potential huge range of values, for example the wide ranging values of light, color, sound, temperature and more. A basic comparison can be found on the living room wall of many homes, a simple wall switch which provides 2 states (on-off) and a dimmer switch which provides a wide range of light values. Further, analog chips must also contain digital circuitry as they must translate waves to digits and then another analog chip would translate back again. The use of cell phones would be a classic example, turning voice to digits for transmission, then back to sound for the ear to hear.

    Your skin contains millions of sensors that detect temperature, touch and more. A desktop computer might contain one that that controls the cooling fan. Current computer systems are ages behind biological systems in integrating sensors.  The simple limited two state range of digital chips continued to work well as the size of components shrunk and shrunk. Unfortunately, it has been the case that analog circuits get worse as they shrink. 

    It wasn't until the 1990's that a process was developed to deal with this problem of analog miniaturization. "The process is modeled on how the human brain adjusts the nerve cells. Called "self-adaptive silicon" technology, it can monitor the chip's functioning and reset it to adapt to changes in temperature or battery power. ...Impinj's analog circuits are simple to design because they self-tune, are small because the transistors themselves compensate for mismatch and degradations, and (because they) learn from their inputs" (Frishberg, 2002). Bill Colleran is CEO of Impinj whose patents are based on the work done at Cal Tech by Carver Mead, and his former student, Christopher Diorio.

    Analog chips are not exclusively analog, but rather also have digital chip components. For example, a wave of sound enters the mouth piece of a cell phone and an analog chip converts the sound to digits, ones and zeros, which are then transmitted to another cell phone whose digital chips must pass it to analog chips which create the sound the listeners hear.

    Optional Readings:

    • Frishberg, Manny (February, 20, 2002). Upside of Downsizing Analog Chips. Wired News, February 1, 2003 at http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,50452-2,00.html.


    Components:

    I/O (Input/ Output devices)

     

    Image courtesy of NIH
    Innovation and change in the definition of the computer also depend on computers' capacity for input and output (I/O). Keyboards are one widely recognized form of computer input. I/O is the computers ability to send and receive bits of information from different devices connected to the computer.

    Here are some examples: 

    • Input examples: keyboard; CD ROM's; DVD ROMs; microphone (including speech analysis/recognition); graphic cards; digital video cards; scanners; cameras; camcorders; video devices such as TV and VCR's; sensors.
    • Output examples: printer; monitor or computer screen; headphones; audio speakers, speech synthesizers.
    • Input/output examples: telephone modem; cable modem; phone; digital video cards; ethernet cards (for connection to local area networks); mass storage devices (diskette drives; hard drives; read-writeable CDs and read-writeable DVD devices).

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    Can you think of other examples that fit in these three categories of I/O? Some I/O topics are so important that they require further detail. 
     

    Computer Input: Speech/Voice Recognition

                   If...you...talk...with...pauses...between...your words, computers have been able to understand human speech since the early 1970's. But no one wants to talk like that, at... least...for...very...long. The goal has always been to enable computers to understand our continuous speech. There are no pauses between our words when we talk normally. The sounds of a sequence of words are more like a fluid than a series of sound bites. The brain reasons it out on the fly. Now, vendors say that they have "fluidic" speech recognition working reasonably well. Both Macintosh and Windows operating systems have included a speech recognition feature. They promise that if you can talk, the computer can type it in as you say it. Be sure and test this hypothesis on a given product before you buy. 

    Optional readings:

    Computer Output: speech synthesis/production/talking

                   There are a number of software programs that can read your word processing text and speak it through the computer's speakers or a headphone set. The visually impaired have been using speech generation technology for decades. Current Macintosh computers have speech generation built in that can read your word processing files to you. Researchers have also been working on creating and improving talking heads or faces on computer screens and facially animated robots. 

    Optional readings: 

    Global Networking

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    The number of people online or accessible through the Internet and the World Wide Web is one of the most important statistics available for both education and business designers. It is also a reasonably good measure of an important degree of computer literacy and capacity for participation in new economic developments in cyberspace. Users connect to the Internet in a wide variety of ways, both hardwired and wireless. The speed at which these users connect is a second key measure of Internet capacity and usefulness.

    Hardwired networking I/O - connecting computers through telephone modems, DSL, and TV cable lines

    Both digital and analog signals are used on the wires or lines which connect computers to each other. Most corporations and university campuses have all digital wiring for their networks. Most home and many businesses connect using analog signals and therefore require a modem to convert signals from digital to analog and back again. Modem is a contraction of the two words modulation and demodulation. These terms stand for what happens when eight bits of information (switches that are on or off within in a computer) or more are transformed into waves of energy going down a non-digital line (modulation) and then these waves are transformed back into bits within a distant computer (demodulation). Common hardwired options for connecting home and many business computers to a computer network include standard telephone, DSL, and cable TV lines.

    Standard telephone modems are capable of speeds that commonly range from 28.8 kb to 56 kb (though what the user actually gets is often a small fraction of that). The term 56 kb means 56 thousand or 56,000 bits of information per second.  Currently such modems are used by the majority of those connected to the Internet around the world. For many countries, including the United States, the movement away from dial-up modems to high speed broadband has been rapid. Broadband speeds typical range from 200 kb to 2 mb and more. From the summer of 2003 to the summer of 2004, the Net Ratings of the New York-based market research firm Nielsen showed that United States broadband use went from 38% to 51% of home Internet users (Walker, 2004). Crossing this tipping point will accelerate the integration of more data intensive media such as video and other services. However, it should be noted that in 2004 the Nielson Company claims that some 55% of Americans (over 149 million people) still do not connect to the Internet (log on) at all.  There are many companies trying to track Internet use. In its announcement in 2003 about new on-demand video news services, "ABCNews.com rolled out research from eMarketer that showed about 37 percent of the U.S. workforce (50.1 million people out of a total of 135.1 million) go online at work, and 86 percent of those at work users have broadband access in the workplace. In the last year (2002), the company said almost 70 percent of its visitors accessed the site with a broadband connection, making it a logical step for the 24-hour all-news service" (ABC News Targets Broadband Subscribers, March 12, 2003). Within the different types of broadband technology, DSL has the most users. "Strategy Analytics reports that 62 percent of the broadband modems sold worldwide in 2002 were DSL, up from 57 percent in 2001, and 33 percent were cable. Fiber, fixed wireless and other technologies accounted for 5 percent" (DSL Leads Global Connections, March 12, 2003).
     
     

    Wireless networking I/O: wireless networks for your home and classroom

    There are three general sources of wireless communication between computers: satellite, tower and wireless station boxes that fit on a table or wall. Wireless has the power to provide universal voice and computer data connections at almost any longitude, latitude or altitude. The speed of satellite services vary from much slower than a 56kb modem to the potential to be competitive with hardwired broadband networks.

    Satellite services can either be for fixed point receivers or mobile receivers. A recent example of fixed point satellite computer networking service was the StarNet service offered through Radio Shack stores that interacted between an uplink or ground station, a satellite and a small dish attached to the roof of your home or business. Radio Shack no longer offers this service and is looking for other products to meet this need. 

    Some satellite companies specialize in mobile users, such as people with cell phones and laptop or handheld computers. Many new products are being announced as available or under development. Hughes Network Systems offers a service called DirecWay  now. In the spring of 2002, Inmarsat announced a service called Swift64, a 64 kbps Internet data service to corporate and private jets at $7-$15 a minute, an expansion of their land based service that has been in operation since 2000. Inmarsat's next generation service is planned for 2004 and will offer 432 kbps service to laptop and handheld computers. Two other such companies are Globalstar and Iridium, which though are much cheaper, also are much slower, offering data speeds from 2.4 to  9.6 kbps. Higher speed systems use a phone line and a satellite combined. Standards are still evolving for two-way fixed high speed satellite access. SES GLOBAL and Gilat Satellite Networks have completed the formation of SATLYNX, the European Two-Way Broadband Satellite Services Joint\ Venture to develop such services. Telesat Canada (available now), Spaceway ($579 for satellite dish including installation, $59.99 per month with up to 128kbps upload and 400kbps download, available now) and Wildblue Communications (3.0 megabit per second in 2003) are working on high speed services in North American.

    There are other digital satellite services that go beyond cellphone and computer networking that are very useful to computer users. For example, Orbital Imaging Corporation is one of many that provides high resolution images of locations on the earth. There are also positioning and radio-navigation services, helping you know where you are and where you are going. As a basic example, imagine that you want to return to a favorite fishing or snorkeling spot on a large lake or in the ocean. A small handheld GPS device can currently help you return to within a couple of meters accuracy of this position.  This is currently provided by the United States GPS (global positioning service) system. The European Union is preparing to offer a competing service by 2008 called Galileo. An advanced version of Differential GPS (DGPS) may be able to identify exact positions with a margin of error no greater than the width of your little finger. "Imagine the possibilities. Automatic construction equipment could translate CAD drawings into finished roads without any manual measurements. Self-guided cars could take you across town while you quietly read in the back seat" (http://www.trimble.com/gps/advanced1.html). 

    Another wireless system is tower based, such as cell phone towers, and links a ground station with a tower on a nearby hill or some high point, which interacts with a "line of sight" dish attached to your home or business. An example would be the service once provided in our region by WNC Internet of Cherokee or by phone cellular services. EtherLinx promises wireless 2 MB speeds with a reach of up to 50 miles from the tower in the months ahead. Engineering groups and companies are making plans for an even more advanced system known as ultrawideband, which will offer speeds of up to 100 mbps, which is double the 54 mbps of the latest Wi-Fi or wireless broadband technology. By August, 2003, Airgo had demonstrated chipsets transmitting at 108 Mbit/s. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 802.15 Working Group for Wireless Personal Area Networks met in Dallas in March of 2003 and plan by the winter of 2003 to have an approved standards around which products could emerge towards the end of 2004.

    Though cell phone companies originally focused on voice traffic, most new cell phones also have the capacity to tap into computer networks and grab email and web pages. In the last ten years USA Today reports that cell phone use has gone up a 1000%, from 13 million in 1993 to 148 million users in 2003 in the United States (July 23, 2003, USA Today, p.1). With cell phone users upgrading their phones almost once a year, it would be a one or two year transition period for phone companies to convert a large number of cell phone users into also being wireless handheld computer users.

    All this wireless capacity has led to the emergence of "hot spots" or places where those with wireless handhelds and laptop computers can sit wirelessly surf the Internet. There has been discussion of major national chains from MacDonalds to Borders Bookstore that would provide a wireless bubble of access within and around their stores or the malls that contain them. The number of hotspots is expected to double by 2005 and then keep doubling until a wireless Internet signal is accessible everywhere. Lists of these hotspots are being compiled so that travelers can eventually find a digital oasis whenever they need one. Some of the more than 50,000 current hotspots in the world can be found at this hotspot index (http://www.hotspotlist.com/). Many downtown shopping areas are considering making free wireless zones out of the many blocks in these business centers.

    The source of the wireless signal can also be a simple plastic box (which is wired to the Internet Service Provider) that is placed on a wall or desk instead of coming from a satellite or tower. This allows great flexibility in the location of different computing devices. For example, you may wish to have more than one computer and/or printer connected to a high speed service without the clutter and hassle of running a separate wire in your classroom or house to that device from your cable or DSL modem. Our WCU campus began wireless support in selected buildings such as Hunter Library in January of 2001. On a  more personal and closer distance basis, infrared wireless is also used between different computing devices that are within a few feet of each other.

    Wireless networking allows quick service setup and much lower costs. Especially in rural and/or mountain regions or in regions of the world that cannot afford the high cost of placing wires everywhere, wireless service will be increasingly critical in reaching homes, schools and offices that are located too far from wire lines to receive their high speed services or cannot afford wire-based services.  The development of free Internet hotspots could play an important role in helping less fortunate families get on the Internet as the price of wireless laptops and handheld computers drop.

    Optional readings: 

    Computer telecommunications: Recent input/output innovations

                   The speed at which computers communicate is measured in bits of information per second. In 1998, the typical device used at home allowed a computer to trade data with other computers using a modem that has a maximum capacity of 28.8KB (28,800 bits per second-bps). The term itself is a contraction of the concepts of modulation-demodulation. To modulate your data is to transfer to state of a bit (on or off) to a wave of sound that can go down a telephone line. At the other end the sound is demodulated, converted from sound to a bit or switch in the computer which is either on or off. The modem, like your printer, is hooked to a connection port on the back of your computer known as the serial port. Our university direct connections to our workstations had a maximum capacity of 10MB (10 million bps) and over time shifted to 100MB (100 million bps). In both cases what you actually get in terms of speed will be much less than the rated capacity of your devices. The type of wiring to your computer and the number of devices using a network can degrade the overall performance. 

     Reaching the market place in the fourth quarter of 1998 was an update to serial port technology known as IEEE 1394, Firewire 400 or iLink. Firewire went through an upgrade in 2003 becoming IEEE 1394b or Firewire 800, which doubled the speed to 800 megabits (800,000,000 bps). They are working on the next upgrade which is announced to run at 1.6 GB (1.6 billion bits per second). To quote Jose Kuhn, a computer specialist, "This is not your grandmother's serial port." Firewire is more likely to be used for devices which need very high data transfer rates such as portable hard drives and digital video systems such as camcorders.

    A competing technology is USB. USB ports are used to inexpensively connect  a wide range of devices to computers. Nearly every computer has a pair of USB ports, and many have the ports both in front and in the back of the computer. The older USB version 1.1 can run about 1.2 megabyte per second and though much slower than firewire, its lower cost made it fine for connecting many devices such as still cameras, printers and scanners. In 2002 it upgraded its engineering standards to USB 2.0 which will allow data transfer at 480 megabits at some point in the future. Current implementations are much slower than the maximum speed allowed.

    For both USB and Firewire, this means that any devices such as scanners, printers, still cameras and video camcorders which wish to use these new speeds will have to have their hardware changed or new devices will have to be purchased which come with the new designs. Speed improvements will continue to come along for both Firewire and USB. 

    Optional readings: 

    Computer Output: Recent screen display innovations:

    Computer users have long had the option of TV size computer monitors of varying sizes with 19" monitor prices recently falling within range of school budgets. Flat screens of three to five inches thick have become popular recently, with Apple's 22 inch Cinema display providing a best of class example. Flat screens are made up of LCDs or liquid crystal displays. Alternatives to these choices are also available. One of the long standing complaints has been that computer screen display sizes do not have the portability and snuggle-up-with quality of books. The Electronic Book '98 Workshop, October 8-9, 1998 in Gaithersburg, Maryland, was held to examine the state of the electronic book format and promote it. This idea is carried even further with the concept of electronic ink and electronic paper. Several examples are currently being tested.  Xerox's research has created an e-paper technology called Gyricon and other variations have been created by other companies. Others see little need for hand-held book-size displays, instead substituting head-mounted displays (HMDs) which are gradually shrinking to a form that approximates the size of sunglasses. Also see the discussion of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) elsewhere on this page to consider their display designs. 
     

      Electronic or Digital Books

      Pro: readers can easily search for a specific passage; publishers could save money by ending the need for paper; such systems suggests the need for organizations whose sole focus will be on editing and qualifying creations; special options are possible for note taking and information organizing; creators could include more charts and images and raw data that is often eliminated now due to printing costs; readers can carry vast quantities of information; no shipping costs because the book is delivered via the modem built-in to the device; allows rapid distribution of books including many thousands of books no longer under copyright protection and now online. Con: speeds book piracy; tracking the more frequent revisions possible with electronic technology; legibility is still not the equal of paper; cost more; at their introduction in the summer of 1998 only a few thousand new book titles were available; this is little market for this in new books.. 

      Optional readings:

      Electronic Ink and Electronic Paper

      Some forms of electronic ink can be printed on almost any surface, from billboards to flexible sheets of paper. Xerox says that its Gyricon product is, "...a rubberized, reflective substance made entirely of microscopic beads that are half black, half white. The Gyricon material is laminated between two sheets of plastic or glass and has the thickness of about four sheets of traditional paper. Before it can be used, Gyricon is filled like a sponge with oil. This creates a cavity for each bead, allowing it to rotate." 

      Optional readings:

      Head-mounted Displays (HMDs)

      Forget the book (which is a hand-held display), and just wear TV screens with your glasses. The standard for measurement in comparing the wearable devices that is emerging is the 2 meter standard. That is the width of view of different HMDs provides the perception of viewing a wide-screen TV with a certain width from two meters. The horizontal widths of 42, 52, and 62 inches are currently (January 2001)  being advertised. Though Eye-trek is currently designed for standard video displays such as those from television, DVDs and VCRs, high definition television and computer display will not be long in coming. By comparison with computer screens, these HMDs have slightly better than a 800 by 600 pixel resolution. Visit the home pages of these companies to see people wearing these products. 

      Such technology would allow confidential personal computer display. This would also allow a wider range of computer applications to be integrated into hand-held and smaller computers. These devices also can provide the perception of being "in the scene" instead of viewing the scene from a more distant and removed perspective, an experience also called immersive display capability. Immersive capacity currently has immediate application in architecture, surgery and entertainment such as gaming and movies. It remains to be seen when such displays will be considered highly competitive with quality computer monitors or even the high quality of printed pages. 

      Optional readings: 

    Mass storage I/O: Recent innovations

    One critical part of computer development is mass storage, the storage of the computer's bits that cannot be permanently kept in computer memory and the residence for those bits when electrical power is turned off. Today's mass storage systems (diskettes, hard drives, ZIP drives, CDs, DVDs) that hold our applications and data when electrical power stops are based on spinning motors. In the long term, anything with a spinning motor in it is likely to become obsolete as new forms of memory are developed. Spinning motors are a major part of the weight of laptop computers, have an intense need for electricity and a fairly high potential for failure or breakage, especially if moved or bumped while being used. In the meantime, they are essential to the expanding needs for computer storage.  Mass storage is generally broken into two categories: fixed and removable. Fixed data storage refers to technology like the hard drive of the computer that stays put in the computer when its users goes elsewhere, often putting the information on a floppy diskette for transfer elsewhere.

    Fixed Data Storage

    Hard drive prices have dropped quickly over the decades. This drop has even been much faster than the drop in prices and increase in capacity of computer chips.  In the mid-1980's, 10 MB (millions of bytes) cost around $1,000. The largest consumer hard drive as of November 2000 was an 80 GB drive that sold for around $400.00 and that capacity doubled the following year for roughly the same price. By 2003, 60 GB drives were selling for $100. Going from 10 MB to 60 GB in storage capacity over 20 years represented a 60,000 fold drop in mass storage prices (Delong, 2003). In 2005, 500 GB drives sold in the $400 range. At the same time, these hard drives have become significantly faster. Writeable and erasable CDs and DVDs are also becoming common. As DVDs have far greater capacity than any other form of removable data storage, they represent the clear winner over the next two or three years for removable storage. It is reasonable to expect the current DVD capacity of 8.6 gigabytes per side to grow to 30 gigabytes or 60 hours of VHS video on one side. Multimedia developments such as hi-resolution imagery and digital audio and video require ever larger capacity disk drives. 

    Based on current trends, it is reasonable to expect a terabyte of data storage for $100 in another few years while systems with a thousand terabytes (a petabyte) and more will be not be unusual. As just one example, this will bring unprecedented developments to the concept of diary and autobiography as people strive to store every waking moment of their lives (Piquepaille, 2003). Adam Couture, an analyst at Gartner in Connecticut, predicts worldwide storage capacity will "swell from 283,000 terabytes in 2000 to more than 5 million terabytes by 2005" (Hildebrand, 2002). The latter 5 million number is also equal to 5,000 petabytes or 5 exabytes. 

    Mobile Data Storage

    Removable data storage is undergoing numerous changes in media. Floppy diskettes are headed for extinction. They hold too little and transfer data too slowly for the larger files increasingly in use. Apple Computer stopped making them a standard part of computers in 1998. Dell Computer decided in 2003 to follow Apple's lead and no longer puts them in all new computers (Casciani, 2003) unless requested.

    There are other more effective competitors for mobile mass storage. Removable "memory cards" are rapidly closing the gap with motor driven memory. Gigabyte memory chips have recently come available for use in digital still cameras and it is only a matter of time before general computers acquire the capacity to use them as well. Chips manufacturers are estimating that by 2005 the memory cards will hold 10 gigabytes of memory and become the primary form of storage replacing floppy diskettes, CDs, DVDs and ZIP disks. Sets of these memory cards could replace high capacity hard drives too. Removable memory cards are the eventual death knell of spinning motors in computers whose spinning drives are destined to become the dinosaurs of mass storage.

           
          167x96 image of memory chip chard 150x146
          Image courtesy of Thumbdrive. Image courtesy of http://www.futurelooks.com/
    This technology represents the future of removable mass storage for not only computers, but eventually eliminating tape for video and audio recorders and players. These "drives" are far better than diskettes or tapes in several ways, including energy required, resistance to shock and size. Eventually they will be as fast or faster than hard drives. There are no moving parts, only chips in the device. These removable chips do not require batteries as they draw their power when plugged into the computer. Some versions hold up to four gigabytes of data (as of February, 2003) and 10 gigabyte storage is predicted for the year 2005. One of the challenges for this new product is that there is no universally accepted name for it, so many names are competing for the title. The list of drive names includes: keychain; USB drives;  USB flash; pen; thumb; pocket and pico drives. 

    In terms of cost, they are increasingly competitive with other media but are not yet cheaper per megabyte. For example, a 32 MB flash drive could be bought for as low as $25 in December of 2002. It would take 23 floppy diskettes to provide the same storage capacity and if you can find the diskettes for fifty cents a disk, those 23 diskettes will cost $11.50. Of course, it is much easier to carry around one flash drive than 23 diskettes and the speed at which USB information is transferred is much faster than diskettes. A single 100 MB ZIP drive cartridge can be found for $8.00 but a 128 MB flash  drive has a lowest price of $79 (January, 2003). Overall these chip drive prices appear to be dropping in half every six months, so that at some point, flash drives will become the cheapest. To keep up with the latest in low prices, try the phrases "keychain drives" or "USB Flash drives."

    USB drive technology continues to improve. The first drives were in the version of USB 1.1 which provides a great speed improvement over floppy diskettes. The new version of the flash drives uses the USB 2.0 design which is some 12 times faster. The speed of  these USB devices will continue to increase to their technical limit in the years ahead. The technical top speed is some 60 MB of data per second, which is faster than the fastest drives of any type in common use in the year 2003.

    DVD and CD burners make a third category of common mobile storage. DVD prices have dropped to the point that the demise of CD burning technology is not far off, given that DVD holds much more data. Where CD technology holds a maximum of 700 MB,  DVD capacity has been in the 5-10 gigabyte range using the current red laser technology. Blue laser technology formats have been approved by the international standards consortium for DVD and will hold 15 to 20 gigabytes of data, which at the maximum capacity of this next generation means that some 3 hours of high definition television could be stored on one side. Companies have predicted such technology will begin to appear in computer systems in 2005 (Associated Press, 2003).

    It should be noted that for most file sizes in use for standard word processing documents and still images, sending files to oneself or others  as email attachments, bypasses the need for removable data storage devices. Having a personal network storage account, such as for a web site, allows even larger files to be stored on the network for later use, though large-size file storage generally means having access to high speed networks so that they data can be transferred as fast as using removable media. With large files, what takes just minutes for data transfer with removable data storage could takes many hours with slow network access.

    Researchers see even greater capacities in future years by moving to organic compounds, including novel plastics. One line of research is pursuing non-erasable technologies, fine for family pictures and corporate data storage, both situations in which the users do not want data erased. Another line of research will be erasable. Both approaches suggest that simple production lines will roll out plastic sheets that can be stacked for dense memory, instead of the environmentally controlled and therefore expensive settings needed for chip production (Eisenberg, 2003).

    Optional readings: 

    Computer System Innovation

    The overall trends and features noted above have led to two distinct lines of development:  increasing the capacity of computers; and shrinking the size of components. These could be simplified as designs for the biggest and designs for the most flexible.

    Many designs reflect the effort for the biggest. Designers combine as many mass storage units, memory chips and ever faster CPUs into one system. Supercomputers and massively parallel computers are one result of this line of thought. The World Wide Web and the Internet with their millions of interconnected computers is another. Other rapid developments such as designing the capacity to compose and display or use the most kinds of media have almost leveled off.

    The other approach is to see what the smallest devices are that can still do something useful. Shrinking the size of components allows engineers to recombine the three basic components of computers (CPU, RAM/ROM, and I/O) in novel ways. Palm or pocket computers have been one step along this line of thinking. The designs of these Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) have converged with cell phones, creating products that some have called Smart phones. Using the same devices, users make telephone calls and make searches with a web browser. Further, this device automatically recognizes the available wireless signals, using wireless Internet signals or cell phone towers for calls which ever is better.

    One of the more personal developments at the edge of change is the concept of wearable computers and wearable computer networks. The trend began with watches and is expanding across our wardrobes. "A person's computer should be worn, much as eyeglasses or clothing are worn, and interact with the user based on the context of the situation. With heads-up displays, unobtrusive input devices, personal wireless local area networks, and a host of other context sensing and communication tools, the wearable computer can act as an intelligent assistant, whether it be through a Remembrance Agent, augmented reality, or intellectual collectives" (http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/, online June 30, 2003). 

    It is not that big a step to envision our glasses (switchable as heads-up display), watch (providing numerous sensors reporting on our well being as well as reporting on conditions in our surroundings such as location, barometric pressure or altitude), PDA and cell phone in wireless communication with each other and other wireless networks, all at our command. 

    As components shrink, even more options will be considered by computer and textile engineers to solve problems for our global culture and personal lifestyles. 

    Optional reading:
    ---- (August 6, 2003). Boston Public School District Using Unique Mobile/Wearable Computers. eSchoolNews Online. http://www.eschoolnews.com/resources/partners/showrelease.cfm?ReleaseID=362.
     

    Conclusions About Design for the Calculating Mind

    To lead, to be able to predict future needs and assist teams and committees that must plan ahead, long-range planners must be aware of current technology trends and the emergence of others. Educators must also be knowledgeable about the educational values of current and coming innovations in technology and how they fit into those trends. This includes three major areas: the CPU; computer memory (RAM/ROM, etc.); and I/O, especially mass storage and communication between the computer and other devices. The shrinking of both the size and cost of computers will continue as the most visible measurements of the change in computer technology which impacts its educational integration, but not the only ones.

    The bad news is that the combined rate of change across all these topics makes it likely that problems with computer design that lead to system failure will continue. The good news for educators is that new technologies do not replace the need for teachers, rather new technologies expand the need for even more teaching and learning. They also expand the need for informed creativity and innovation. At the core of human cultures that survive these trends in the 21st century will be a learning culture that is deeply integrated into every aspect of those societies.
     
     

    Summary

    81x82

    How should educators balance the teaching of four generations of thinking technology, and integrate planning for the major trends in our fourth generation thinking tools? As the summary graph above indicates, the long term trends indicate not only a continually increasing pace of change, but just short term predictability in regards to the specifics of these trends. Lightly touched by this composition is consideration of how to organize learning, curriculum and instruction in light of such trends and 21st century technologies. How can or should we organize our communities and our schools to take maximum advantage? How can the use of these 21st century technologies enhance and accelerate our teaching and learning with even the most basic topics of reading, writing and speaking? That work is of such a scope that it must be left for a separate composition, Communities Resolving Our Problems - the Basic Idea, and the remaining chapters of this online book. 

    New understanding and new curriculum will inevitably emerge. It should now be clearer that in an age of accelerating change, educators have a tremendous opportunity and obligation to dig deeply into the numerous possibilities of fourth generation or computing technologies for problem discovery and problem solving. Further, 4th generation technologies should be used to revitalize attention with the first three generations. However, our overwhelming attention to our astonishment with 4th generation thinking technology may keep us from seeing a still larger picture. With time, we may need to return to the thought that the real computer is still a human being, that digital technology is merely one more new ally for the real computer, and that this digital ally has evolved far beyond its use in scientific and mathematical calculation. For in fact, the digital technology embedded in our desktop and other computer systems does not think and will not think with the human richness that should be associated with that term. Human beings, not computers, must be the hub around which we balance our needs for digital and analog thinking. Put in another way, the specialized support for thinking that digital computers provide is but one more important element on the palette for the more wide ranging and more significant nature of human thought.


    Last Updated January 29, 2006. |  Bibliography  |  History Index   |   Chapter 1    |    Page author: Houghton