THERE’S PLENTY OF language bandied around about a “post-PC” world, but what does a truly post-PC world look like? How can we expect business and home life to change when the personal computer becomes a museum piece? And what should we expect to replace it?
Some would say we’ve always been waiting for the end of the PC. The roots of the personal computer lay in the work of pioneers like Alan Kay, who predicted not the clunky desktop of the last 30 years, but a portable “dynabook”.
Kay worked at Xerox Parc when the familiar mouse and windows desktop was invented. His 197X Dynabook was 1968’s vision of a personal computer, but was “no larger than a notebook, weighed less than four pounds . . . should be able to present 4,000 characters . . . dynamic graphics of reasonable quality, file storage of 500 ordinary book pages traded off against several hours of audio files”.
What many have suggested as the post-PC environment – where we use mobile phones and tablets for our needs – is really the Dynabook vision of a PC, fulfilled. It’s less the replacement for the personal computer, and more its last and greatest embodiment.
Comparing the loving 1960s illustrations of a thin screen with a flat keyboard below it, you can’t help but be reminded of an iPad with its virtual keyboard onscreen.
But what comes after that? If the post-PC was predicted nearly 50 years ago, the post-post-PC environment was first spelled out by Xerox Parc’s chief technologist Mark Weiser in 1988, 20 years after his predecessor had first anticipated the tablet.
Weiser imagined an explosion in the variety of computing devices we’d use, in a setting he called “Ubiquitous Computing”. Not just tablets and mobile phones, but centimetre-sized wearable computers, and meter-sized placards would surround us.
Subsequent ubiquitous computing advocates envisaged “smart dust” and “smart skin” – computing devices too small to operate by hand, or draped over other, more pedestrian objects.
Ubiquitous computing predicts a future where the PC has not so much left the scene as become an invisible part of it. Everything computes, everything calculates, everything is networked: but none of it looks like a computer. The computing part is just a given; what’s really important is the interface.
We’re pretty much already down that line already. The computing core of our many devices are now near identical. Every Android device, every iPhone, every iPad, runs a form of Unix, the operating system that preceded even Windows in describing the powers and forms of a modern computer.
There are alarm clocks and video recorders that run Unix, Wi-Fi boxes and cable modems. This is an amazing thing, given that Unix was once the stuff of refrigerator-sized microcomputers. Unix used to, intentionally, describe everything a computer could do. How it appeared to the outside operator was a small part of that range. It was, in the technical terminology it engendered, the kernel around which a thin “shell” of human-tolerable interfaces were wrapped.
Now the kernel of Unix lies embedded as a far tinier core for a much larger wrapping. Interaction with the user has grown as the physical platform for the PC has shrunk. We’ve discovered what the average person can do with a computer is defined as much by how it presents itself as by what it can potentially achieve.
And what is the interface of the future, the interface for the post-PC? The multi-touch sensibilities of modern smartphones and tablets give a hint of it.
We are invited, in these applications, to imagine there is no interface – just objects that we move, under glass. We know it’s a lie, and those objects are just images, and that they are still much closer to the kernel of a machine, smeared underneath the screen, than we will ever be.
But it’s better than it was when we used a mouse as a clumsy puck to describe how we desperately wanted a virtual arrow to move.
The aspiration of the ubiquitous computer is that its interface be no interface at all. The sign of a true post-PC world will be when the interface itself becomes the world around us; when it will be hard to even point to where the computer lies. Is it in front of us, in our glasses, in our clothes? Everywhere we gesture will not be an indication of where the processing takes place, but what we want the processing to be about.
There’s a corollary to that endpoint. When Alan Kay wrote about computers, when Rolling Stone and Wired magazine wrote about Xerox Parc and Steve Jobs and Microsoft, it was an attempt to describe a potential. The terminology was about revolutions, and the incredible power of these new personal computers.
Even as those computers have grown more powerful, that rhetoric has grown less. There will be nothing revolutionary about the post-PC world, because the revolution will have already happened. When we finally forget computers are even there, when computers become so much of the background of our lives that we hardly remember to bring them to the foreground even to discuss them – that’s the post-PC world. It’s a mundane, almost inevitable, future – but it’s what the revolution was all about.
