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In 1992, when Steve Roberts got ready to cycle around the country, he built himself a bicycle that included four computers, a satellite link, and a cellular modem. The only problem was that the equipment needed solar-powered batteries so big that the bike weighed 580 pounds. Roberts needed 105 gears to make it up hills, which he might climb as slowly as one mile per hour. Today, he’d be able to take along the same kind of computing power with just a few pounds of equipment—a personal digital assistant, a notebook computer with wireless modem, a Blackberry e-mail device, a Global Positioning System (GPS) wristwatch, and one of today’s teeny cellphones, all with batteries included. (Roberts wouldn’t draw the same stares that, he says, made it so easy to meet women, but that’s another story.) The reason for the shrinking of equipment is only partly Moore’s Law, which famously says that a computer’s power will double every 18 to 24 months. The main reason is Gene’s Law, a little-known formulation that has huge implications. Gene’s Law postulates that the electricity needed to run a computer circuit will decline exponentially because of advances in battery technology, because of better power management, and because circuits consume less power as they shrink. Since 1994, when Gene Frantz, engineer emeritus at Texas Instruments Inc. (www.ti.com), came up with his law, the electricity required to run an integrated circuit has declined by a whopping factor of 10 every 24 months. The improvements show no signs of slowing down. Less power means smaller devices because, as with Roberts’s bicycle, batteries account for a huge proportion of the size and weight of any electronic device. So we are well on our way to cutting the second of the two cords that tether our computers in place. Through wireless modems, we have cut the phone cord. Now, we’re going to cut the power cord. The result will be ubiquitous, small, low-power computers that can communicate without wires. It’s easy, at the moment, to discount the importance of the move toward cordless computing. After all, any company involved in technology has seen its stock battered. Besides, there is a backlash against the idea that consumers will increasingly use wireless computers to do business on the run. But technology marches on. By 2005, according to Gene’s Law, we should be able to carry around in our front pockets a device with the power of a Sun Ultra SPARC III workstation. By 2010, we should be able to wear on our fingers the computing power of IBM’s ASCI White, the most powerful computer in the world today. The computer, used for simulating and modeling the ecosystem, currently occupies a huge air-conditioned space and takes 28 tractor trailers to be transported. Even if we can’t figure out what to do with all that power right away, we’ll be able to attach cheap, disposable computers to just about anything. They could be embedded in cans, bottles, and boxes, to help companies track them as they progress all the way from manufacturing into a consumer’s home and, ultimately, the garbage (potentially creating a new wave of privacy issues). Computers could be woven into clothing so that parents could locate children who wander off in a store. Already, Hitachi Ltd. (www.hitachi.com) is teaming up with Xybernaut Corp. (www.xybernaut.com) to offer what they’re calling the Wearable Internet Appliance, which has a head-mounted display that attaches to a processing unit small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. The device, which weighs 11 ounces, gives the wearer access to the Internet for music and video entertainment, for paging, for cellular voice communication, and for GPS information. Xybernaut also offers wearable computers for industrial uses—for instance, letting airline mechanics look up information in repair manuals online. The medical field also provides a host of interesting possibilities. Diabetics can now have a tiny fiber inserted into the skin that monitors their glucose levels; before long they will be able to wear a small pager-like device whose screen will let them constantly monitor those levels. If necessary, a doctor working remotely could also have constant access to the information. Shrinking computers have also led to a tiny camera that the Food and Drug Administration recently approved. Inserted into a capsule that a patient ingests, the camera has the ability to take pictures of the inner workings of the body and will open the door to a slew of medical advances. Some of the potential uses of cordless computing are pretty far out there and may be hard to fathom just yet. But remember that today’s average battery-operated laptop computer contains more computing power than existed in all of North America in the mid-1960s.
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