Financial Journalist

South China Morning Post Jan 1993

By Gerry O’Kane

In 2010 your systems will offer the world

The computer on the desk was the size of a laptop. The only reason for that was that the Professor liked to type. The dormant screen flickered and a video window appeared. The face said “Excuse me Dr Chan, you have an incoming call from Professor Lee in New York.”

Professor Chan looked up from his book, he still liked the feel of paper. “Okay, patch him through.” In the window the face of Professor Lee appeared and the two talked for a while. He was asking what Chan thought of the new weather data coming from the Lockheed Defence Meteorological Satellite Programme. Chan rang off and asked the computer to access the Lockheed database and soon the online satellite imagery of swirling cloud cover appeared on-screen.

The hurricane appeared to be over Hawaii. He called up the latest CNN report from a ravaged Waikiki Beach and watched as houses lost roofs and cars overturned. He asked to the computer to do an analysis using his Weather 3 application he developed last year using object oriented programming. After a few more hours of study and computer work he called a colleague in Manila.

He had never met Mr Alverez but got straight through. “Mr Alverez I don’t know if you been following Hurricane Alice but I think it might hit the outer islands. Here’s my data and analysis.”

A file with video projections of Alice’s path appeared on Mr Alverez’s screen, complete with notes on damage estimates. Mr Alverez did not speak Cantonese or English, only Spanish: the computer had translated.

Fiction? Not according to either AT&T or Apple Computers. While few want to predict the future, present research indicates that is precisely the kind of desktop computerisation that will be available in 2010. Indeed, according figures and research being done by C. Kumar Patel, AT&T’s executive director, research, materials science, engineering and academic affairs division, that is precisely what the PC of 2010 will do.

Apple Computer has already produced a five minute video showing its machines performing these tasks somewhere around the year 2000 - commonly known as the Newton. “The Newton will be designed to replace everything from keeping a diary to accessing all information. It will go beyond a personal organiser and have an assistance capability to anticipate your demands and carry out your commands,” says Scott Schnell, director of Evangelism, the Apple unit developing the company’s future.

It will be as a result of technologies converging - speech processing, video, photonics, storage, processor manufacture and too many others to be listed. At present we have many elements that will go into such a machine, others are absent but all are possible.

How will computers so small, become so powerful? How ubiquitous will data become? And will communications cope with these increased demands?

According to Mr Patel the advances projected in microelectronics will easily help these PC developments. The number of components now being crammed onto a silicon chip is doubling every 18 months. “That trend will have matured by the year 2010 with chips containing up to a few billion components.” That will be done by using more and more precise lithography - x-rays and electron beams accurate to 0.1 of a micron. It will also change how chip manufacture will be done - from the present four weeks to three days. Even transistors will measure 400 by 400 atoms.

But even if processors become smaller and more powerful how can all this data be transmitted through a computer fast enough? Current circuit technology would find it difficult. By then PC manufacturers will be using photonics - controlling electrons by light and data transmission by light. Not only will everything become faster but according to Mr Patel, photonic systems will not operate sequentially but by parallel processing.

“It is estimated that such massively parallel photonic computers could have up to 1000 times the capability of today’s most powerful electronic computer,” he says.

And that improvement in ‘light’ technology will help in communications so necessary for integrating the PC of Professor Chan’s into worldwide databases and telephone systems. That 1000 fold increase in power will also be found in managing and sending information over optical fibre networks. One pair of fibres today take 50,000 telephone calls, in 2010 it will be 50 million - a capacity that will have to be reached to fulfill the demands for real-time information and video.

The way communications will operate will change, too. According to Michael Spindler, Apple’s president, ” There will be another trend (already happening) - communication inversion.” He believes that the traditional transmission by air will move to landline and vice-versa. Television will boom but via cable, with users having the choice of thousands of programmes, some interactive.

Meanwhile telephony will go via air - microcells pick up the transmissions and feed them into the optical fibre backbone.

Already Scott Schnell has displayed a transceiver which fits into a Powerbook and transmits at almost the same speed as an AppleTalk LAN. That is how Professor Chan received CNN and Lockheed - that video and data information was transmitted via the optical fibre backbone and then transmitted via wireless technology to the PC.

And that conversation with Mr Alverez? Well they could see each other because of videophone technology which would be easy over fibre optics. AT&T estimate the US will have 20 million videophones by 2010, this one was built into the PC.

What about voice? Speech processing chips are becoming more powerful by 33 per cent each year, and the algorithms to handle understanding of context, accent and semantics are improving all the time.

“We have a prototype called Casper,” says Mr Schnell. “I think it is the most exciting part of Apple technology.” It understands and writes on screen what Mr Schnell tells it. Up to a point, it makes mistakes and does not understand content but he believes it is only a matter of time before it is perfected.

Already AT&T demonstrated a real-time voice recognition and translation system at Expo 92 in Seville, Spain. While it had a limited vocabulary (carrying out financial transactions), it translated English to Spanish and vice versa. “The technology trend also leads us to expect that recognition vocabulary will be unrestricted and will permit natural language interaction allowing individuals to interact directly with networks and machine resident databases,” says Mr Patel.

So will Professor Chan warn Mr Alverez of the oncoming hurricane in 2010, even without speaking Spanish? “We may not be able to predict the future since many things are changing simultaneously and rapidly but we can surely enable the future to happen by nurturing appropriate technologies,” argues Mr Patel.

Future technology, Apple, Bell Labs, AT&T