SAN MATEO (10-24-95) - Get ready for a new generation of information appliances that are more networkable, 10 times easier to use, and less expensive than today's personal computers, especially Pentium PCs laboring under Windows 95.
You remember, following the Jurassic Period, that plug boards gave way to key punches, teletypes to 3270s, and shared-logic word processors to PCs. Now it's time that Wintel PCs give way to, or at least make room for, Internet stations, or whatever else you end up calling them.
If you think PCs are the only conceivable way to compute, consider that there are now 20 times more microprocessors shipped each year than the are found in today's bloated Windows/Intel-based PCs.
In addition to hundreds of millions of invisibly embedded microprocessors, there are tens of millions of video game players who wouldn't consider running Windows on Pentiums, yet those chips have better multimedia capabilities, and cost five to 10 times less.
And there's talk of tens of millions of digital cable TV converters -- set-top boxes -- delivering interactive multimedia, free of the Wintel monopoly tax, and therefore costing US$200 each.
Oracle Corp.'s CEO, Larry Ellison, who in the 1980s prophetically mapped the decline of the IBM mainframe, recently declared the PC ridiculous for use on the Internet. Ellison is touting Oracle's concept of a WebStation: an Internet appliance costing several hundred dollars that, for example, can play CD-quality rock videos downloaded in real time from, of course, Oracle servers over the Internet via ISDN.
As if fresh out of a meeting with Ellison, Sun Microsystems Inc.'s CEO, Scott McNealy, is now touting some sort of Internet station for $299. It will browse the Web and download applets written, of course, in Sun's new Java language.
This month in Scottsdale, Ariz., at Agenda 96, InfoWorld's invitation- only annual conference for 500 of the most influential people in the PC industry, I ran into Hermann Hauser, the internationally famous entrepreneur, whom I first met in 1992 during my year at the University of Cambridge in England. Hauser told me he will ship NetSurfer, a Wintel-free Internet station, in November. He is seeking partners to bring NetSurfer to the United States in the first half of 1996 for, you guessed it, $299.
Hauser, an Austrian-born Cambridge-educated physicist, founded Acorn Computers Ltd. in 1978 to make PCs in the United Kingdom, including a million for the BBC's computer literacy program. In 1984, with $200 million in sales, he sold 60 percent of Acorn's public shares to Olivetti, where he became vice president of research. He has since founded 20 more companies, including London's second stock exchange and an Internet access provider called UK On-line. Hauser is still chairman of Acorn, which is the company that will ship NetSurfer.
Hauser says NetSurfer is a keyboard with three plugs. It gets electrons from your power receptacle, photons from your television, and bits at 14.4Kbps from the Internet through your telephone jack. It runs a Web browser out of 2MB of RAM and 4MB of ROM over Acorn's video windows operating system and the Acorn RISC Processor -- the same 30,000-transistor processor in Apple Newtons and Nokia cellular telephones. Next year, NetSurfer will run Sun's HotJava Web browser and therefore all downloadable applets written in Java. Sounds as though McNealy's and Hauser's Internet browsing boxes might be the same.
Anyway, buy NetSurfer, plug it in, enter your name and address, and after an automatic local call, you're on the Web.
One of NetSurfer's secret weapons is Acorn's time-tested anti-aliasing outline font software which, Hauser claims, makes Web pages look good on your TV. Or you can use NetSurfer's VGA port. It has a printer port, too. Upcoming generations of the NetSurfer will have two-way cable TV access and infrared keyboard connections. The NetSurfer is designed to be viewed at a distance, like your TV.
Now, if Hauser's NetSurfers take off, what will we call them? Not diskless PCs, I hope. Internet stations? Web terminals? How about if we continue from Coke machines, cash machines, automated teller machines, and call them hypertext machines (HTMs)? Or from record players, tape players, game players, to Web players? Telegraphs, telephones, televisions, to telebrowsers? You tell me. What should we call the coming non-Wintel appliances for connecting users to the Web?
(Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet in 1973 and founded 3Com Corp. in 1979. He receives e-mail at bob_metcalfe@infoworld.com via the Internet.)
[Copyright 1995 InfoWorld (US), International Data Group Inc. All rights reserved.]