On the way back to the airport from the recently concluded Embedded Systems Conference, I tuned in NPR's Morning Edition, which is celebrating its 20th year, and listened to a special report on how technology has changed the lives of an average American family. I was surprised to learn that the family has become PC-centric.
The family profiled in the NPR segment includes two young children, six and four, who have their own playroom desktop on which they play games and learn interactively. Mom, who also has a desktop, consults the Internet on such matters as what to read to the children at night; Dad does the family budget on his notebook. The report was peppered with nuggets from PC history: the large, TV-like dials on Apple's first personal computer, AT&T's rejection in 1978 of an offer to take over the Internet from the government (Robert Lucky, Bell Labs' Communications Lab director at the time, said he saw no use for the technology).
The report concluded with a throwaway comment about how some things never change: The PC-savvy kids still board a big yellow bus every morning, just as children did 20 years ago.
It was then that I recalled coming across a story on our sister publication's Web site. It told about a microprocessor that had been designed for PCs but had been relegated to embedded applications, with a throwaway explanation to this effect: When chips don't make it in PCs, they end up on the heap of embedded apps.
Both reports may have accurately reported the facts, but they were somewhat lacking in perspective.
At the Embedded Systems Conference, you couldn't help but notice that computing power is being inserted into every conceivable appliance, from Net-based terminals and kiosks to multimedia cell phones to set-top boxes that make computers of TVs. As Wind River Systems CEO Jerry Fiddler said in his keynote, "I don't know if Java will be around in five years. I do know that there will be chips controlling all aspects of our lives, and we won't know it; it will all be embedded."
Fiddler knows what he is talking about. The only worry he has is the ominous rumblings that Redmond's PC-software behemoth is making on the embedded-systems scene.
In our PC-centric collective consciousness, it may be hard to imagine that one does not have to see computing power to appreciate it. Yet when we reheat dinner, adjust the thermostat, set a radio station or monitor the driveway, we enjoy the benefits of compute power whose origins we rarely stop to consider.
From the looks of it, in five years' time embedded computing's influence will have risen exponentially-and we'll still be waving at the curb as the school bus pulls away: mechanical power still gets us where we're going.
If only there were a way to embed knowledge into our kids' brains remotely. But some things never change.
— Nicolas Mokhoff is editor, EE Times Online.
