The portal between science fiction and reality just opened another crack. John Sculley, the boss at Apple Computer, recently showed off a computer program, dubbed Casper, which follows spoken commands and replies in pretty good English. Both Sculley and inventor Kai-fu Lee told Casper to schedule an appointment, and the computer blocked out time in an on-screen datebook. Sculley then told Casper to program a VCR, asking that the machine record a one-hour program “next Tuesday,” and the computer set the time. Casper was even able to launch and use a word-processing program. The packed house of industry figures, often a long-knives bunch, gave Casper a standing ovation.
They weren’t just applauding a new computer gewgaw. Speech-recognition programs have been around for a while, but most have to be tailored to a single user; Casper can converse with just about anybody. Most programs respond only to single words; Casper hears whole sentences. Most important, Casper isn’t confined to the airy reaches of supercomputing. It runs on a personal computer, the top-of-the-line Macintosh Quadra. But it was also easy to see putting a chunk of Casper into just about any appliance from a home-security system to a car. “Everybody in that room could touch and taste that event,” says Richard Wurman, organizer of the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference. “They knew it was going to be part of their lives.”
You remember the future, right? When we were kids, comic books and “Star Trek” readied us for some kind of gleaming techno-paradise. So far the future hasn’t delivered. Technology hasn’t yet solved any of the really Big Problems-you know, poverty, war and injustice. High-tech industries we saw as our hope have been mastered by determined foreign rivals. We can’t even control the technology in our own homes, which is why our VCRs are still blinking 12:00 … 12:00 … 12:00 …
But now a new wave of technology is coming as the fields of computers, consumer electronics and telecommunications blend together. The result: an explosion of new supergadgets and services that could change all our lives. As toy-loving cover boys Wayne and Garth might say, really excellent tech.
Two trends are driving this revolution. In the first, powerful computers are shrinking to palm size-small enough to become the tiny brains within our consumer-electronics gear and telephones. The other trend: information is going digital. Text, sounds and pictures are all being translated into the ones and zeroes that computers read. Many of us have already taken a first step into the digital age with our CD players. While today’s TVs, turntables and phones use the same analog technology that Alexander Graham Bell worked into the first telephone, the CD player’s microprocessors translate the digital pits on the disc into clear sound. Going from today’s analog TV to digital video promises to bring the same fidelity to our screens that CDs bring to our speakers. Telephones are going digital, too, and advances in wireless technology and greater reach for high-speed data networks will open up new worlds of communication. Little wonder Microsoft chairman Bill Gates calls this “the new digital world order.”
Signs of the revolution are popping up faster than monsters in a video game. Companies like Apple, Hewlett-Packard and Sony have announced coming products that make up the first harbingers-from TV systems that help cull good shows from the growing morass of cable trash to electronic books that put whole encyclopedias in a briefcase. Apple and Sharp announced last week they were working together to develop handheld gizmos–“personal digital assistants’–to keep the electronic equivalent of a Rolodex file and appointment calendar; others are coming that will track electronic messages and voice mail while you’re on the road. Eventually we’ll be able to send and receive rich “multimedia” documents that combine text, sound, pictures and even video. After jotting a note to the folks, you could add on the latest video clip of the grandkids at the aquarium. The new machines will have one thing in common: hidden computers will handle the digital data. So far, the first taste of digital tech is still too pricey for anyone but the try-it-all gadgeteers; the first American high-definition TV could cost $5,000. Butjust as popularity has quickly driven PC prices down, digital gadgetry could be within most consumers’ reach before the end of the decade.
Of course, not all of the tech toys will be well received. David Nagel, who heads Apple’s Advanced Technology Group (ATG), says he has already rejected the idea of a smart dipstick that would tell drivers when to add oil and, he says, “We will not be putting supercomputers in toasters. Toasters are easy enough to use.“But this “hidden computer” revolution of the ’90s could be even bigger than the personal-computer revolution of the ’80s. Why? For all its billions in sales, the computer revolution has reached only 15 percent of American homes by some estimates largely because people really don’t need expensive and complex machines to balance their checkbooks. The next revolution will involve computers that consumers will actually be able to use-and might need to use. Nagel predicts, “We’ll see these couple of years as a real turning point in the ways we live, work and play.” It may sound like science fiction, but “it’s coming faster than anyone expected,” adds consultant Sheridan Tatsuno of the Rio Del Mar, Calif.-based Neoconcepts. “I expected it in five years and it’s already on top of us now.”
Many companies are vying for a piece of the digital future–computer firms, consumer-electronics concerns and even video-game makers such as Nintendo. One reason so many companies are acting now, says Tatsuno, is hard times: “The recession has companies looking for hot growth areas instead of just milking their cash cows.” These companies are feeling squeezed in other ways. Computers have become low-profit commodities, while consumer electronics companies are desperate for a new hit like the VCR. That’s why both industries see the new market as their big chance. Unlike the present consumer-electronics market, this emerging field isn’t dominated by Japanese companies; so far the field is wide open. It’s a rare opportunity for American firms to regain leadership in a market it had lost (page 46). While “there will be a lot of boxes that are Japanese,” says Nathan Myhrvold, a Microsoft VP “I have not given up on there being American manufacturers.”
The stakes are high. Apple-arguably the company with the best shot at riding the new wave-is virtually remaking itself as a consumer-electronics company. It is a bold plan, loaded with risk. The company is betting the bank on new products that will face stiff competition from savvy Japanese, European and American companies. Thin profit margins and tough rivals make success an iffy proposition, says consultant Paul Saffo of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based Institute for the Future. “You could do everything right-and fail.”
But the opportunity is too great to ignore. Already, the technology in our homes is about to get a whole lot more complex. Fiber-optic lines could begin to reach homes in the next few years, setting the stage for hundreds of cable channels and whole online libraries. The biggest opportunity for businesses lies in helping consumers take the fire hose of information and draw off eight-ounce glasses at will. “The key to this whole information explosion,” says Wurman, “is what’s really being done to make things understandable.”
The first of the new high-tech gizmos have started to appear. But the real revolution is going on in the research-and-development labs of the nation’s computer companies. Anyone who wanted to know where Apple-or the consumer electronics industry-was going could have gotten a glimpse back in 1988. That’s when Knowledge Navigator, the best computer Apple never built. The Navigator couldn’t be built-at least not then. Apple came out with a four-minute video-produced by George Lucas, no less. In the video, a college professor used the Navigator to pull together his rain-forest lecture at the 4 last minute. The professor simply told the laptop-size machine which research articles to find; it searched networks and pulled the information in over a radio link. He chatted with a colleague via an onboard video phone. Most intriguing of all was the guy in the bow tie– a computer-generated secretary (nicknamed “Phil” inside Apple) that took the commands, answered questions and gave the prof phone messages. Phil was a true “digital assistant”-in effect, an interface that really was a face.
Computer firms get into a lot of trouble for touting products that aren’t ready yet-the industry calls such stuff “vaporware.” This couldn’t even qualify as vapor. And when Sculley showed up on the cover of Fortune magazine holding the molded plastic prop from the video, critics howled. Columnist John C. Dvorak of PC Magazine says, “I thought it was laughable idealism.” Yet the video did serve as a high-tech rallying cry that diverse technologies can come together and make something unexpected, useful and … really cool.
A look inside Apple shows the promise of the coming new age of supergadgets and what consumers can expect to see in their homes through the end of the decade. Apple opened its labs to NEWSWEEK -“opened the kimono,” as CEO Sculley put it-though it would not discuss actual products under development. Apple’s Advanced Technology Group is a place where people get paid to have fun with expensive toys. It’s an environment that breeds happy zealots-and, the company hopes, profits. The longstanding rap against Apple has been that it has great stuff in its labs, but rarely gets that innovation to market. Under David Nagel, ATG has gone from an ivory tower to a practical-research team. Still , visiting the labs is a little like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole, with looking-glass weirdness and wonder at every turn. Here’s what Apple and other electronics companies have in store for consumers:
Apple is working on several versions of Sculley’s person al digital assistants. While CEO Sculley is generally mum, he can’t resist a little peep show. He unzips a soft carrying case that would be too small for most laptop computers. From it he draws an odd object: rectangular, but with gently rounded sides. A computer? It is much more-and much less. There are no keys; just a flat screen and a stylus. It feels powerful; like a blank sheet of paper, it is pure potential.
“What is it?” asks a visitor. Sculley smiles, something the reserved CEO does not do easily. “I’m not going to tell you,” he says, and coyly puts the mystery object back into the bag.
It was almost certainly a test model of a personal digital assistant; the company has announced it will begin selling PDAs as early as January of next year. The market version could fit in a jacket pocket run programs like an electronic appointment diary a phone list and a to-do list, and might also let users carry home memos from the office. It would the next step up from products like the popular inelegant Wizard, the current top-of-the-line electronic organizer made by Sharp. The key to last week’s deal between Apple and Sharp could be a computer language refined within Apple’s ATG branch in Cambridge, Mass. The “object oriented” language lets developers build programs from modular chunks-the way a child assembles a Mr. Potato Head-putting together applications for the new gadgets in a fraction of the time that it would otherwise take. “You could say it’s our goal to put that code on every computer in the universe,” says ATG scientist Bob Cassels. “Including your watch,” adds Steve Strassmann, who came to the group from the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
In one office at Apple, frizzy-haired Michael Kaplan is eaching his Macintosh to read handwriting-a technology that could make electronic secretaries easier to use, or give you another way to tell your VCR to record “Harvey.” Kaplan scrawls a passage from “Moby Dick” on an electronic pad, and it appears on the screen. “This reads things I can’t read in my own handwriting,” he jokes. Most pen computers make you write each letter in a separate box, but Kaplan’s allows a broad scrawl–and has enough software smarts to pick up words in the context of each sentence. The technology could be available for high-end Macintoshes or specialized devices within a couple of years.
Apple is actually a late convert to “pen based” computers, which use an electronic stylus instead of keyboards. New offerings this year are emerging from such companies as GRiD, NCR, NEC and newcomer Momenta. Several companies are introducing personal organizers for those machines: Pensoft’s Perspective shows a screen that looks like a paper datebook; when the user jots a note to schedule a meeting with Bob onto the screen, the words appear there in type. The machine then links the name to other records, such as Bob’s phone number and notes from previous meetings.
The most tantalizing new marriage between technologies combines computers and telephones. The devices will let us send and receive messages around the world–not just the name-and-number snatches available on today’s pagers, but full documents and, eventually, with voice messages and pictures. Forget to bring important documents along on a trip? Use the gadget to call the computer on your desk and retrieve the files you need–or fax them to your hotel.
Richard Allen, Apple’s manager of communication technology, is constantly tinkering with ways to help computers reach out and touch other computers. Eating lunch at a nearby Japanese restaurant, Allen pulls out one of his company’s PowerBook laptops. He’s tacked a radio modem to its back, a possible product for portable computers or future personal digital assistants. By grafting software he’s developed onto Apple’s Remote Access program, the friendly, burr-cut engineer calls his desktop machine (which is about two blocks away) and retrieves his electronic mail and a file he had been working on that morning. When a recent executive meeting got boring, he used the computer to run back to his office without leaving his chair. “People who saw it said, ‘Gee, I’d like to be able to buy that’,” Allen says, with the smile of a kid who has the neatest toy in the sandbox.
Others are looking at this market, too. Motorola and Ericsson GE have introduced tiny radios that connect mobile PCs to electronic mail and phone systems. By the end of this year, the data network for Ericsson’s radios will let users wander to any of 100 American cities and still stay in touch-but the radio costs nearly $1,800. Several pocket-size computers that can work with the mini-radios have hit the market already: Hewlett-Packard’s 95LX runs the range of programs for IBM PCs, including the omnipresent Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet.
Future computers will navigate networks of data and news services to print a daily personalized newspaper-an idea long prophesied at the MIT Media Lab, but now virtually at hand. While the high cost of most of today’s on-line information services would restrict their use to business for now, the hardware and software are quickly coming within reach. Apple has a program that could be released as early as next year, code-named Rosebud, which combs on-line news wire services for stories users care about-without having to learn the arcane commands used by most services today. It can put together a newspaper from many topics or take individual requests. Type in a question about Apple’s product-development plans and the program quickly spits out a list of stories. Rosebud even does a pretty good job of presenting the articles’ order of importance: stories that include the words “Apple,” “product” and “strategy” come before stories that merely mention the company.
While ATG members like Kaplan and Allen are looking at better ways to get information into machines, Michael Mills is finding new ways to get information out. Mills explores uses for QuickTime, a software wonder he helped create that lets Macintosh users drop movies into anything from sales demonstrations to school reports, using the same kind of simple cut-and-paste editing that word processors allow with text. Companies like Utah-based word-processing giant WordPerfect are scrambling to put QuickTime capabilities into their software. It’s powerful-but more important, it’s fun. Mills shows off a breathtaking video taken atop the Golden Gate Bridge: users choose the view by clicking with a mouse, panning to any part of the panorama-from the view across the bay to the cameraman’s shoes. “Navigable movies,” he calls it, beaming. He and his team are getting ready to create a video tour of a virtual Russian palace.
The biggest change may come from your television screen. Last week lawmakers in Washington got a peek at the first over-the-air broadcast of a high-definition digital television. But these much anticipated TV sets won’t just have sharper pictures; the hidden computers inside could put real power into our living room. On most of today’s cable systems, pay per view means the ability to order just a few programs at prescribed times; new technology could put a private video store on tap at any time. Call up the program-guide screen-with a preview of selected shows, if you like. Viewers will be able to shop in video “catalogs”-and probably pay by the credit cards your TV keeps on Me.
Sculley says he wants to “reinvent television’!-and that idea is taking form in a San Francisco lab. Designer Fabrice Florin puts Technopolis through its paces, as he has done for dozens of test consumers. It’s a vision of the future based on parts that have not all come together yet-but it shows how TV technologies will merge in the next decade, and how high-tech tools can help make the otherwise daunting array of services easy to use. Technopolis, a fictitious town,, appears on the screen, and an animated guide invites you to enter one of the “buildings” on Main Street. The movie theater is actually your basic cable service, with detailed program guides and video previews available with a flick of the remote control. There’s also a video library, a “Shopping mall” and a “museum” for educational programming. Technopolis’s creators even foresee a video version of today’s computer bulletin boards, where hobbyists find people with similar interests–Technopolis users could actually talk to each other through microphones on the remote. People could meet in digital cafes or, say, watch a baseball game together, passing running commentary back and forth with each play.
Some of what Apple is proposing is already available to a limited number of hightech couch potatoes. Companies like TV Answer are readying the equipment to provide the home-shopping, banking and program-guide services through a console that hooks up to your TV. And in Springfield, Mass., cable-company ACTV has conducted an experiment that lets customers actually choose among several viewing angles for a sporting event-from the 50-yard line to the end zone–instead of leaving it up to the guys in the control room.
Heady new ideas seem to be everywhere these days. Apple has been inviting Japanese consumer-electronics manufacturers into its labs and then brainstorming about products they might produce. Sculley pulls out a carved wooden model of a “concept” machine: an enhanced digital camera. Digital cameras shoot the image and store it on a computer disk, displaying the picture in a video-screen viewfinder. Apple’s addition: the photographer could talk a description of the scene into the machine or scribble notes about the scene onto the viewfinder-and store it all on disk with the image. ATG has also experimented with a smart cassette recorder that would let users mark spots on the tape by pushing a button–a feature already available in Sony’s high-end recorders. Apple would then let users load the recording into a computer. If you’ve recorded a physics lecture, you can quickly use the markers to find the professor’s trenchant comments on quarks-and send it as electronic mail to fellow students or insert them into a term paper on disk.
It all sounds too good to be true, and some of it just might be. Some Apple watchers raise questions about the company’s ability to deliver the goods. “Apple is well situated,” says technology-and-trade writer George Gilder. “Whether they proceed to execute well is uncertain.” Sculley admits that his company doesn’t yet have expertise in the cutthroat consumer-electronics market, but expects alliances with Japanese companies to provide insights in both manufacturing and distribution. But giants like Sony aren’t likely to cut their own throats to help a competitor; Apple will learn only as much as its “partners” want it to know.
While the digital future holds risks for companies like Apple, there may be downsides for society as well. Portable communicators might solve some problems but will inevitably create others: you’ll never get away from your boss again. More important, the new technologies could make the data-rich richer and leave the rest of us behind. The great educational and entertainment resources won’t come cheap-especially at first. The problem with easy phrases like Bill Gates’s trademarked “information at your fingertips” is that so far, finding a single article from a database easily cost $20 or Dvorak: lite few who can afford the extraordinary expense of these searches.“Most troubling to many skeptics are the new TV sets of the digital age: some see them as potentially even more addictive than the present boob tube. Says Neil Postman, a New York University professor and author of “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology,” “You already don’t have to go out to the movies because you have your videos and your TV, and your CDs.” With new TV technology, he says, “you’d never have to go out and meet anyone. Is that great? It’s a catastrophe!”
Alan Kay agrees. A computer-industry legend who helped create the ideas behind personal computing at Xerox PARC, the research playground where ideas like personal computers and graphical computer screens were born, Kay is now an Apple scientist. He warns that reinventing television won’t be worth it if the result “could just be a new paralytic form of TV … we don’t want to give you something worse in the guise of giving you something better.” He sees digital TV as bursting with opportunity for education, medicine and industry-and says he wants to make sure the content is as good as the picture. To evangelize for the new medium, Sculley currently flies to Los Angeles once a month to meet with industry figures that include Disney chairman Michael Eisner and superagent Michael Ovitz. “Television’s going to get a second chance,” Sculley says, “and there’s a chance to do it right this time.”
As more high-tech companies look for ways to become part of the new digital world order, they are catching the ‘mood of the moment. “It’s put the excitement back in computing,” says Denise Caruso, San Francisco-based editor of the newsletter Digital Media. The computer age might finally reach the estimated 85 percent of homes without computers. If it’s done right, buyers won’t think of their new toys as computers at all. Whatever they call it, their purchases could mean welcome jobs for American workers. Ultimately, we might all get the technology-and the future-we always wanted. It still won’t eliminate those Big Problems. But at least we’ll have powerful tools that work for us, and don’t just blink in to the night.
Your television could become a window on a new world of shows and services-with a clear digital picture.
Users bank, pay bills and shop via TV
Video libraries bring movies on demand
On-board computer finds shows, sets VCR
Early model: 1993
These silicon secretaries could replace the notes and phone slips that clutter your appointment diary and address book.
Alerts user to appointments
Stores phone numbers and notes
Some models could take voice commands
Early versions available
Part phone, part pager, it receive messages, keeping you in touch with the office wherever you roam.
Radio links to voice mail, electronic mail
Early versions: 1992
< b>A HISTORY OF THE FUTURE
Dreaming up futuristic gadgets has always been a part of popular culture. A sampler
A 1940s eye towards miniaturization
Tex-Avery’s 1953 tele-betting cartoon
The 1957 film reflected fears that computers would replace us
For many 60s kids, the first high-tech look ahead
The 1965 shoe phone wasn’t just funny,but prescient
In the 1968 film, HAL the mad computer was almost human
