I have been a geek ever since I can remember. I remember programming at school when you got a card to write your program on using a pencil mark for each character. It would take a couple of week to develop your program and then days to mark up all your cards. They would then be collected and sent off and two weeks later a print out was returned with your program printed out with the results.
My biggest program took ages and on the results being returned I had no answer. It was pointed out that I had missed a full stop. So I fixed the error and then waited another two weeks to get the results and printout back. Thank god we have progressed from there. My journey took me from a 16 switch interface which had some flashing lights to my first computer a "Sinclair ZX80" this was the ultimate with touch pad keyboard. Using my own cassette recorder for media storage, and a black and white tv. It took many hour of cursing and swearing before I got the screen to display the cursor, but I persisted and finally it came. That computer was based on the ZX80 Chip and 1k of memory, yes (1) one kilobyte of memory or 1024 characters. I had such fun with this very powerful piece of technology. I ended up getting a memory upgrade to 32k of RAM. This was housed on a piece of circuit board 10cm x 10 cm. It was a bare board with multiple chips and wires which had to be stored in some aluminum foil and unwrapped and plugged in when needed. O' what power I had then. :)
From there, there was no stopping me, I then went through a VIC20, Commodore 64, Tandy TRS Model 3 and finally to my first IBM Compatible which was not that compatible. Then through the XT, 286, 386, 486 Pentium till finally into Laptops and finally Slate or Tablet computer. In fact my current tablet is an "iTablet" yes thats right and "iTablet" not an "iPad".
But where will it stop, only recently it was the Netbook which is in someway a cut down laptop, but that is slowly being dispelled as these little Netbooks are as powerful and many laptops but considerably longer battery life. Then there came the e-Reader which was a technology fit for purpose and there future was looking very good, until. You guessed it, Apple and Steve Jobs. The launch of iPad basically has killed the e-Reader Market.
The iPad launched and provided all the functionality of an e-Reader but in full colour and giving wireless and 3G connectivity. It did not have the ePaper quality but for the price comparison it just devastated the e-Reader market. These devices have drop so much in price many companies that were about to release their version either drop their prices by 1/2 or 2/3 and even with drew from the market.
This space which the iPad had carved out for a while has been quite. There has been a lot of talk about other devices coming to market which will compete or attempt to kill the iPad market but much has yet to reach the market. But finally it is starting to happen, the devices are starting to pour into the market. Android and Microsoft have provided the OS to run these devices and more are still coming.
But where do we go from here. The Netbook was looking so promising, but from all indications the tablet will change that dynamic. There will still be some netbook in the market place but I believe that market will go the way of the e-Reader. But will the tablet be here for long as these devices are more and more being so well connected to the grid, ie the internet, phone systems (3G) local networks we don't need to have so much storage on the devices they are becoming more and more an interface into the Cloud.
What I see is that more and more it will be just a surface that we interact with to use and manipulate our data. The table will just be the interface into the cloud and what we will start to see is more publically available surfaces. Microsoft has been demonstrating these surface in desks and in someway they have been more of science fiction due to costs and accessibility for the general public.
I see the device that we will end up with will be our identity. We will then interact with these intelligent surfaces to access our information and data. You will walking into the internet cafe or communication location where you will be identified and your interface which will be customise to your settings will appear on the surface and you would carry out your work.
Once you have finished as you walk away the surface will return to a clear surface ready for the next user. The only time we would have a portable device when there is no surface to work from. Our desks of the future will be dynamic surfaces which then curve up to present a clear perspex screen which would display our information while we are using the surface.
What I see for the future is the development of personal identification and identity management devices which will take advantage of these surfaces as we will see the computer of now disappear. Someone who saw all of this in our future showed us many years ago what we were heading for. My all time favorite show Star Trek, Check them out even the original series you will see our future is getting very close to what Gene Roddenberry showed in these shows. These surfaces you will see completely in the New Generation and Voyager.
So I would say the old keyboard and desktop computer have a very limited future and those dynamic surfaces will be with us in the very near future.
But the Tablet or Slate are now coming of age. Steve Jobs
