room size	desktop/lap size	pocket size	fingers size
Eniacs (starting 1945)	Laptops (starting 1981)	Wearables (starting 2002)	Waveables (starting 2006)
Click the images for related sets of pictures and click the words for related articles.

The Harry Potter series of books and movies by J. K. Rowling has this educationally delicious metaphor for creating change, the magic wand. Simultaneously utter the right formula and wave the magic wand with the right touch and change happens. Reality, of course, is somewhat different, though the growing capacity of our computer designs is approaching the size though not quite yet the shape of a magic wand. Understanding how our current digital "wand", the computer, is created and shaped helps dispel the myth of its magic. In getting past the sense of magic about computers, we better understand the real-world role we must play to use this digital tool to create effective and supportive changes in the world around us. In fact, there is not "a" digital wand but multiple types of computers and connected devices, as the pictures above show. They have all become "personal computers" in that a high percentage of citizens now own or share the capacity of each of these types. They range from from giant room size (supercomputers) to desktop/laptop size to voice recognition driven pocket computers (e.g., iPhone 4S) to waveables (e.g., Wii), but each shares the same underlying 3 categories of features. By learning a device's specialized "spells" (commands and procedures) and how to apply them at the right time using the touch of the right computer system, change also happens.

This creation of tools to serve our commands goes back millions of years. Humankind has constantly innovated in developing and using tools to increase its leverage for solving problems, whether increasing the mechanical leverage of our muscles or the intellectual leverage of our brains. From the creative use of the simplest machines such as levers and pulleys to solar system spanning satellites, better ideas, new materials and new technologies constantly emerge for new problem processing purposes. Computing devices are no different. As with each of the other generations of thinking developments, this digital fourth generation of thinking tools will drive transformations of the educational system. That is, digital system designs are a symbiotic part of a larger human system, a digital system that must evolve in tandem with human evolution or there is no market for its advances. That is, computing advances ultimately depend on advances in our educational systems, in our ability to use our intellectual tools to real advantage. Having a basic understanding of how computers function is essential for not only advancing education, but enabling educators to advance how computers can help civilization progress. A better computer operator can not only uses its current tools more wisely but can direct the making of better tools as well. The right commands with the right type of "wand" will have a powerful impact.

In this digital computer era, computer hardware design continues to shift through the use of different technologies to hold and process the most basic element of computer information, the bit, a one or zero. A bit can be thought of as a light that is either on, a one, or off, a zero, or it could be be thought of as a gate that is either closed, a one, or open, a zero. A row of bits, or many rows of bits, make patterns that hold information, holding and processing everything the computer can display. Can you think of simple patterns of ones and zeros that might hold information? For example, 00000100 might stand for the letter A and 00000101 might stand for the letter B or the color red of a pixel on the computer screen, or a particular pitch of sound. By the year 2007, such digital patterns of bits held over 94% of all the world's information, and growing.

Currently computers hold and process these patterns using transistors, switches representing ones and zeros. A transistor is a kind of electron gate or electronic switch. The first transister (the picture on right from a video by engineerguy) was a chunk of germanium (a semiconductor) and a special pattern of electrical parts invented in 1947 to replace the unreliable vacuum tubes then in use. The first integrated ciruit was invented in 1958 and contained within it just a few transistors and logic gates. As with the pictures at the top of this page, the technology required to hold and pass the state of a one or zero (a bit) in an active computer has shrunk using ever finer integrated circuits (ICs). Today, tens of billions of transistors can fit on on a piece of silicon the size of a fingernail to make up computer memory and its control logic and decision making switches. Further, trillions of magnetic particles on a hard drive can be set to the same patterns of ones and zeros.

The overall size of the technology making those switches or bits has not only shrunk but increased the speed, capacity and adaptability of the computer. To hold those bits of information computer designers used vacuum tubes in the 1940's, then later electronic switches (transistors) etched into silicon chips that hold electrons; the bits were stored for the long term in magnetic particles on spinning hard drives. Next generation research has already produced photon gates and single atom sized gates. But no matter the size of the device, computers all share a basic underlying structure of three major design elements which these thoughts will explore in greater detail: the CPU (processing), RAM/ROM (active memory) and I/O (input and output devices). 

When the on-switch of a computer is pressed, the initial loading of the computer's operating system, comes in two parts. Though small in comparison with the operating system, the computer's ROM chips contain a set of instructions that first tell the machine's parts to wake up and then to find and load into computer memory its upgradeable operating system which then drives the functioning of the CPU, RAM/ROM and I/O. This system can then support an additional layer of specialized applications that do such things as provide video editing or playing and enable Web page searching and reading as well as millions of other functions.

All of these parts must run as a highly integrated team. As the computer is operated one might imagine the insides of the computer as a series of conveyer belts carrying information between the CPU (central processing unit), high speed RAM and lower speed long term storage. Each of these conveyer belts runs at different speeds because the different components that the conveyer belts connect have different capacities. For example memory chips move information around thousands of times faster than the hard drive can move data. Computer network connections generally run even slower than the hard drives, but not always. Speed up the CPU or other parts and all the conveyer belts will need an upgrade as well to take advantage of the speed. Consequently, you cannot stick a new CPU in an old computer and have it run faster without changing many other things. Put another way, there is no advantage to having your heart beat faster than the body's circulation system can move the blood around. The bits of a computer are the blood in its system. This is why it is generally cheaper and more effective to buy a new computer every few years than try and keep upgrading an old one.

Educators' careers are already tightly integrated with the processing (understanding and composing) and management of information. In 1986 less than 1% of the world's information was digital; by 2007 over 94% was digital with stored digital information expanding at the rate of 23% a year (Hilbert & Lopez, 2011). The knowledge explosion and its digital nature is very real (Houghton, 2011). Though public school's digital resources have lagged far behind the general culture, it is both natural and critically important that educators follow the trajectory of current and future computer developments closely. Further, if educators communicate their needs and visions well, their ideas will also help lead the development of new computer designs and information processing tools. Since news items come along continuously every year that fit into each of these three categories, educators might challenge their students to make a bulletin board for each of these three areas (processing, memory and input/out devices such as longer term storage) with pictures and news of technologies that they discover through the year. As these developments are followed, teachers should ask students to look for trends in what they are reporting.

Components: The CPU
	Image courtesy of LBNL

 

Speed thrills. Computer speed is driven by the CPU, the heart of computers. The Central Processing Unit is the center of a computer's operations. The collection of all the transistors needed to carry out CPU functions on a single chip is referred to as a microprocessor (How Things Work, 2010) or processor. The CPU processes collections of bits called bytes. A byte is the number of switches or bits that the CPU can receive from RAM/ROM at one time and consider in its calculations in one operation. The most current models of personal computer CPU's have a 64 bit byte but 8 byte to 32 byte microprocessors can be found everywhere, from elevators to bread makers to car engines. The CPU is sufficiently generalized to handle all computing tasks, but such generalization sometimes requires specialized processing units such as GPUs (graphics processing units) to support devices which include video graphics. Both Intel and AMD announced hybrid CPU-GPUs for 2011 that lower power requirements and improve image handling, which will have special value for handheld mobile devices.

The speed of a computer can be measured in different ways. One measure of speed is the CPU's clock cycle, or how many times per second the CPU can give out instructions with what to do with a set of bits. For a long time this was measured in millions of times per second (megahertz rate), and currently in billions (gigahertz rate). From the 1974 to 2000, most computers were measured by megahertz speeds. A CPU that runs at one megahertz would complete one million operations per second. By the end of the year 2002, 2 gigahertz (2 billion operations per second) systems were common. Though single CPU's pushed out to 3 gigahertz speeds they generated too much heat, which led to a redesign with multiple CPU's or multiple cores carrying out tasks in parallel, currently ranging from dual-core to quad core design. For example, a leading manufacturer of microprocessors, Intel, announced its Core i7 quad-core products on November 17, 2008 (Wikipedia, 2010) whose 4 integrated CPUs each run in the 2 to 3 gigahertz range (Wikipedia, 2010). Perhaps some day there with be a CPU for every application running in the computer.

Measures of the computer's speed by how fast its heart can beat can be a misleading measure of a computer's power. A fast heart rate does not mean you are a fast runner and the same is true of computers. A slightly better measure, subject to the same conveyer belt integration problem, is to test the computer's ability to do something basic but useful in the real world such as add two decimal based numbers together, which can take more than 1 clock cycle or 1 hertz. This is known as a floating point operation, a FLOP. Comparing hertz to flop rates is not always useful but a Core2 Quad processor from Intel could run at 70 gigaflops (Wikianswers, 2010). Keeping up with the rapid evolution in computer speeds requires some knowledge of the sequence of some prefixes for bytes and flops. For example: megaflop=million; gigaflop=billion; teraflop=trillion; petaflop= a thousand teraflops or quadrillion; and exaflop=a thousand petaflops or sextillion. On June 15, 2011 the computer chip manufacturer AMD announced a chip processor that handled 400 gigaflops in a laptop computer and promised 10 teraflop speeds in a laptop weighing a couple of pounds within eight years (Myslewski, 2011). On November 15, 2011, Intel announced the Knight's Corner co-processor chip (image on right) that contains 50 cores (actual independent processors) with a speed of 1 teraflop (Barak, 2011).

Even though our personal computers are going through rapid increases in speed, they are hardly the fastest computing devices around. The fastest computers in the world are not personal computers, but immense room-sized collections of thousands of CPUs called supercomputers. Astonishing, their improvement rate is much faster than personal computers. According to Kirk Skaugen, vice president and general manager of Intel's Data Center and Connected System Group, "(T)he largest supercomputers in the world . . .have actually been growing at about two times Moore's law" (McMillan, 2012). If you've ever searched Google or ordered something from Amazon.com, your personal computer was communicating with a supercomputer. Beyond science and government use, supercomputers are increasingly the backbone of online businesses. For example, Amazon.com rents out its spare supercomputer space to thousands of other businesses and Web operations with its the cloud computing utility service (Takahashi, 2010) .

Different companies in different parts of the world have been playing a game of competitive leap-frog, with ongoing announcements of the "newest and fastest" supercomputer for decades. The first 1 teraflop supercomputer (shown on the left) was Intel's ASCII Red ("ASCII Red", 2011) that first became operational in September of 1997 and was used by the Department of Defense from 1997 to 2005. To achieve such speed, the system required 72 cabinets of servers. As of 2011, 14 years later, Intel matched that speed with a single co-processor chip, Knight's Corner, using vastly lower power consumption.

The first 10 teraflop computer was a 200,000 pound computer used in US Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore Labs in 2001 (Myslewski, 2011). The world's fastest computer in July 2002 was a supercomputer in Yokohama, Japan that ran at over 35 trillion floating point operations per second (35.86 teraflops) for the Earth Simulator Project which does climate modeling, merging the work of over 5,000 integrated CPUs. On March 24, 2005, the IBM computer called Blue Gene ran at 135.5 Tflops, harnessed over 32,000 sub-computers (nodes), and was designed for continuous improvements in speed. In December of 2010, the fastest was the Chinese supercomputer Tianhe-1A that has achieved 2.67 petaflops (a thousand teraflops), which uses 14,000 Intel Xeon 5670-series x86 processors and 7,000 nVidia Tesla GPUs (graphic processor units) (Perlow, 2010). Intel announced the summer 2011 installation of the Blue Waters computer which will use photonic components (light replacing electrons), run 4 times faster than the current Tianhe-1A and has set its goal on exaflop (a thousand petaflops) computing speeds by 2020 or sooner, and then the project was canceled. On June 20, 2011 the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Japan announced the Kei Supercomputer (see the clickable picture in this paragraph for more images and information), an 8.2 petaflops supercomputer made up of 68,000 processors contained in 672 cabinets with an electrical and maintenance bill of 10 million dollars a year. The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, has announced the construction of the Titan, 18,000 Tesla GPUs based on Nvidia's next-generation Kepler processor architecture, with speeds up to 20 petaflops (Montalbano, 2011).

More details on other supercomputers can be found at the top 500 site. The term supercomputer is a highly relative term referring to the fastest computers available on the planet in any given year. Numerous pictures of supercomputers are available online. These pictures indicate that the room size computer or computer complex has never really gone away. Today's supercomputers still need even more of the space and cooling equipment than the original room sized ENIAC computer did in the 1940's.

 In spite of their rapid growth in capacity, today's computers based on electrons will one day become the dinosaurs of the early history of computer technology. Thought of another way, today's electronic or electron-driven computers are in the steam engine age of the history of the automobile which came before today's internal combustion engines. The next generation of computers may be based on photons (light beams) and run hundreds of times faster than today's fastest computers and be cheaper to build. The Rocky Mountain Research Center announced the first photonic transistors in 1989 and received the first U.S. Patent for such in 1992 (Docstoc, 2010). IBM's Blue Waters supercomputer is based in part on photonic transistors. After photonic or light beam transistors, work is underway on nanotechnology, with the first precision control of a single atom transistor announced on February 19, 2012 (Fuechsle et al., 2012), offering the hope in twenty years of computers a billion times faster than today's. One could surmise from these developments alone that the next fifty years of computer technology will be as dramatic as the first.

Components: RAM/ROM- computer memory
	Image courtesy of NASA

Most computers today use computer chips for active computer memory, thumbnail size wafers of silicon or other substances that come in two distinct species, digital and analog. Computers communicate within themselves and with other computers using the digital 1's and 0's. To interact with the world around them they need analog chips that can deal with continuous states of information that translate back and forth between the analog and digital environments.

Digital Chips

The CPU is a  one kind of digital chip and it has already been discussed. Memory chips make up the second major part of a computer.

Computer memory contains many digital chips, which contain small switches representing a condition of on or off or a 1 or a 0. Many different techniques and chemical structures are used to make this concept work. Currently computer "chips" made out of silicon are currently used to manage the state of these switches. Silicon is one common substance used to create computer memory, but it was not the first, and is certainly not the last. For example, serious work is being done on using the chemical structure of proteins to create computer memory. Biochips are in your future. 

Memory: RAM/ROM/EPROM Chips

Computer chips are designed to serve several different kinds of memory needs. Though RAM and ROM are the most common forms of computer memory chips, there are other forms of which EPROM is one example. 

• RAM is Dynamic Random Access Memory, also called DRAM. This memory (settings of the switches) is emptied or lost when the electrical power to the computer stops. This referred to as volatile memory. Because your most current computer work is stored in RAM, this is why you lose your most recent typing at the computer when your computer crashes or the electricity goes out.
• ROM is Read Only Memory. These transistors are placed in specific settings during their manufacture and cannot be erased once they are programmed or loaded with specific instructions. These chips enables your computer to start up or carry specific directions that leave in a state that you can tell it what software to run.
• EPROM and Flash Memory. EPROM is Erasable Programmable Read Only Memory. These chips allow the user to store data that will not be lost when electrical power to the computer stops, but through various techniques can be quickly erased to start over again. This is known as nonvolatile memory. Flash chips were developed as a more efficient system than EPROM as they can be erased in a flash, yet hold data when the power is off.
• MRAM is Magnetic Random Access Memory, which uses the magnetic spin of electrons instead of power refreshing to hold the electrical signal of one or zero. This is another form of nonvolatile memory that is being developed. This will allow: immediate start up without booting software from a hard drive; greatly reduce battery usage; store more data in the same chip space; and provide faster access to data. 

When purchasing additional RAM for a computer, the computer manual that ships with your computer will tell you which kind you need. These chips might be titled SIMMs or DIMMs chips and new types will emerge. Over the long term RAM prices have dropped steadily, but over a period of months, the price fluctuates considerably in high and low cycles.

Bytes are discussed in different size units: kilobyte = 1000 bytes (K or KB); megabyte = million bytes (M or MB); gigabyte = billion bytes (GB) ; then terabyte = trillion bytes (TB). This is then followed on up the scale by petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte, and yottabyte. In the near future you will own or use computers with gigabytes of RAM. For someone whose first computer contained 16K of RAM nearly twenty-five years ago, I still find this astonishing.

Optional Readings: 

• Kingston Technology's ultimate memory guide on how memory works; 
• How Ram works - from howstuffworks.com ; protein memory ; Holographic storage
• NVE Corp.'s MRAM
• Voss, David (Aug. 4, 2000). MRAM as Instant Access Memory. Wired Magazine. [http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/mram.html]

Analog Chips

Your skin contains millions of sensors that detect temperature, touch and more. A desktop computer might contain one that that controls the cooling fan. Current computer systems are ages behind biological systems in integrating sensors.  The simple limited two state range of digital chips continued to work well as the size of components shrunk and shrunk. Unfortunately, it has been the case that analog circuits get worse as they shrink. 

It wasn't until the 1990's that a process was developed to deal with this problem of analog miniaturization. "The process is modeled on how the human brain adjusts the nerve cells. Called "self-adaptive silicon" technology, it can monitor the chip's functioning and reset it to adapt to changes in temperature or battery power. ...Impinj's analog circuits are simple to design because they self-tune, are small because the transistors themselves compensate for mismatch and degradations, and (because they) learn from their inputs" (Frishberg, 2002). Bill Colleran is CEO of Impinj whose patents are based on the work done at Cal Tech by Carver Mead, and his former student, Christopher Diorio.

Analog chips are not exclusively analog, but rather also have digital chip components. For example, a wave of sound enters the mouth piece of a cell phone and an analog chip converts the sound to digits, ones and zeros, which are then transmitted to another cell phone whose digital chips must pass it to analog chips which create the sound the listeners hear.

Optional Readings:

• Frishberg, Manny (February, 20, 2002). Upside of Downsizing Analog Chips. Wired News, February 1, 2003 at http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,50452-2,00.html.

• Texas Instruments. Analog: A Fundamental Technology for the Internet Age. Online February 1, 2003 at http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/press/backgrounder/analog.shtml.

Here are some examples: 

• Input examples: keyboard; CD ROM's; DVD ROMs; microphone (including speech analysis/recognition); graphic cards; digital video cards; scanners; cameras; camcorders; video devices such as TV and VCR's; sensors.
• Output examples: printer; monitor or computer screen; headphones; audio speakers, speech synthesizers.
• Input/output examples: telephone modem; cable modem; phone; digital video cards; ethernet cards (for connection to local area networks); mass storage devices (diskette drives; hard drives; read-writeable CDs and read-writeable DVD devices).

 

Computer Input: Speech/Voice Recognition

Optional readings:

• Dragon NaturallySpeaking® Professional Solutions.
• The Qbe (pronounced "cube"), personal computer tablet with speech recognition
• Speech Recognition Made Easy with Talk to Me, teaches Spanish
• Voice Perception Research bibliography maintained by faculty at the University of California - Santa Cruz.
• Dragon NaturallySpeaking (product review)

 

To search for even more recent news, use these search phrases: fluidic speech; continuous speech; voice recognition; speech recognition; speech analysis. 

Computer Output: speech synthesis/production/talking

Optional readings: 

• Yahoo's index to speech generation sites ; see the animated talking face at the Yale site .

Global Networking

The global scene has been changing rapidly over the last decade. Note the differences between the two sets of data in columns C & D. This data is from the World Internet Stats site.

.

The number of people online or accessible through the Internet and the World Wide Web is one of the most important statistics available for both education and entrepreneurs (business creators). It is also a reasonably good measure of the growing need for computer literacy and the capacity for participation in new economic developments in cyberspace. Users connect to the Internet in a wide variety of ways, both hardwired and wireless. The speed at which these users connect is a second key measure of Internet capacity and usefulness.

Hardwired networking I/O - connecting computers through telephone modems, DSL, and TV cable lines

Standard telephone modems are capable of speeds that commonly range from 28.8 kb to 56 kb (though what the user actually gets is often a small fraction of that). The term 56 kb means 56 thousand or 56,000 bits of information per second.  Currently such modems are used by the majority of those connected to the Internet around the world. For many countries, including the United States, the movement away from dial-up modems to high speed broadband has been rapid. Broadband speeds typical range from 200 kb to 2 mb and more. From the summer of 2003 to the summer of 2004, the Net Ratings of the New York-based market research firm Nielsen showed that United States broadband use went from 38% to 51% of home Internet users (Walker, 2004). Crossing this tipping point will accelerate the integration of more data intensive media such as video and other services. However, it should be noted that in 2004 the Nielson Company claims that some 55% of Americans (over 149 million people) still do not connect to the Internet (log on) at all.  There are many companies trying to track Internet use. In its announcement in 2003 about new on-demand video news services, "ABCNews.com rolled out research from eMarketer that showed about 37 percent of the U.S. workforce (50.1 million people out of a total of 135.1 million) go online at work, and 86 percent of those at work users have broadband access in the workplace. In the last year (2002), the company said almost 70 percent of its visitors accessed the site with a broadband connection, making it a logical step for the 24-hour all-news service" (ABC News Targets Broadband Subscribers, March 12, 2003). Within the different types of broadband technology, DSL has the most users. "Strategy Analytics reports that 62 percent of the broadband modems sold worldwide in 2002 were DSL, up from 57 percent in 2001, and 33 percent were cable. Fiber, fixed wireless and other technologies accounted for 5 percent" (DSL Leads Global Connections, March 12, 2003).
 
 

• Optional reading: The Last Analog Telephone Modem You'll Ever Buy , v.90 standard for 56K speeds over telephone lines.
• Optional reading: Broadband or Bust 
• For more optional readings, search online for: modems; wireless modems; cable modems; broadband.

Wireless networking I/O: wireless networks for your home and classroom

Satellite services can either be for fixed point receivers or mobile receivers. A recent example of fixed point satellite computer networking service was the StarNet service offered through Radio Shack stores that interacted between an uplink or ground station, a satellite and a small dish attached to the roof of your home or business. Radio Shack no longer offers this service and is looking for other products to meet this need. 

Some satellite companies specialize in mobile users, such as people with cell phones and laptop or handheld computers. Many new products are being announced as available or under development. Hughes Network Systems offers a service called DirecWay  now. In the spring of 2002, Inmarsat announced a service called Swift64, a 64 kbps Internet data service to corporate and private jets at $7-$15 a minute, an expansion of their land based service that has been in operation since 2000. Inmarsat's next generation service is planned for 2004 and will offer 432 kbps service to laptop and handheld computers. Two other such companies are Globalstar and Iridium, which though are much cheaper, also are much slower, offering data speeds from 2.4 to  9.6 kbps. Higher speed systems use a phone line and a satellite combined. Standards are still evolving for two-way fixed high speed satellite access. SES GLOBAL and Gilat Satellite Networks have completed the formation of SATLYNX, the European Two-Way Broadband Satellite Services Joint\ Venture to develop such services. Telesat Canada (available now), Spaceway ($579 for satellite dish including installation, $59.99 per month with up to 128kbps upload and 400kbps download, available now) and Wildblue Communications (3.0 megabit per second in 2003) are working on high speed services in North American.

There are other digital satellite services that go beyond cellphone and computer networking that are very useful to computer users. For example, Orbital Imaging Corporation is one of many that provides high resolution images of locations on the earth. There are also positioning and radio-navigation services, helping you know where you are and where you are going. As a basic example, imagine that you want to return to a favorite fishing or snorkeling spot on a large lake or in the ocean. A small handheld GPS device can currently help you return to within a couple of meters accuracy of this position.  This is currently provided by the United States GPS (global positioning service) system. The European Union is preparing to offer a competing service by 2008 called Galileo. An advanced version of Differential GPS (DGPS) may be able to identify exact positions with a margin of error no greater than the width of your little finger. "Imagine the possibilities. Automatic construction equipment could translate CAD drawings into finished roads without any manual measurements. Self-guided cars could take you across town while you quietly read in the back seat" (http://www.trimble.com/gps/advanced1.html). 

Another wireless system is tower based, such as cell phone towers, and links a ground station with a tower on a nearby hill or some high point, which interacts with a "line of sight" dish attached to your home or business. An example would be the service once provided in our region by WNC Internet of Cherokee or by phone cellular services. EtherLinx promises wireless 2 MB speeds with a reach of up to 50 miles from the tower in the months ahead. Engineering groups and companies are making plans for an even more advanced system known as ultrawideband, which will offer speeds of up to 100 mbps, which is double the 54 mbps of the latest Wi-Fi or wireless broadband technology. By August, 2003, Airgo had demonstrated chipsets transmitting at 108 Mbit/s. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers 802.15 Working Group for Wireless Personal Area Networks met in Dallas in March of 2003 and plan by the winter of 2003 to have an approved standards around which products could emerge towards the end of 2004.

Though cell phone companies originally focused on voice traffic, most new cell phones also have the capacity to tap into computer networks and grab email and web pages. In the last ten years USA Today reports that cell phone use has gone up a 1000%, from 13 million in 1993 to 148 million users in 2003 in the United States (July 23, 2003, USA Today, p.1). With cell phone users upgrading their phones almost once a year, it would be a one or two year transition period for phone companies to convert a large number of cell phone users into also being wireless handheld computer users.

All this wireless capacity has led to the emergence of "hot spots" or places where those with wireless handhelds and laptop computers can sit wirelessly surf the Internet. There has been discussion of major national chains from MacDonalds to Borders Bookstore that would provide a wireless bubble of access within and around their stores or the malls that contain them. The number of hotspots is expected to double by 2005 and then keep doubling until a wireless Internet signal is accessible everywhere. Lists of these hotspots are being compiled so that travelers can eventually find a digital oasis whenever they need one. Some of the more than 50,000 current hotspots in the world can be found at this hotspot index (http://www.hotspotlist.com/). Many downtown shopping areas are considering making free wireless zones out of the many blocks in these business centers.

The source of the wireless signal can also be a simple plastic box (which is wired to the Internet Service Provider) that is placed on a wall or desk instead of coming from a satellite or tower. This allows great flexibility in the location of different computing devices. For example, you may wish to have more than one computer and/or printer connected to a high speed service without the clutter and hassle of running a separate wire in your classroom or house to that device from your cable or DSL modem. Our WCU campus began wireless support in selected buildings such as Hunter Library in January of 2001. On a  more personal and closer distance basis, infrared wireless is also used between different computing devices that are within a few feet of each other.

Wireless networking allows quick service setup and much lower costs. Especially in rural and/or mountain regions or in regions of the world that cannot afford the high cost of placing wires everywhere, wireless service will be increasingly critical in reaching homes, schools and offices that are located too far from wire lines to receive their high speed services or cannot afford wire-based services.  The development of free Internet hotspots could play an important role in helping less fortunate families get on the Internet as the price of wireless laptops and handheld computers drop.

Optional readings: 

Data

• 11 MB speed technology, the 802.11b standard. Consumer use: Apple's Airport device ;
• Business use: Cabletron , Cisco , and other companies.
• Mobile Computing , which emphasizes wireless connectivity

GPS

• GPS World Magazine http://www.gpsworld.com/gpsworld/
• Why, What and How GPS works - http://www.trimble.com/gps/index.html

Satellite Imaging and Other

• OrbImage http://www.orbimage.com/
• Space Imaging http://www.spaceimaging.com/level1/index38.htm
• Yahoo's list of remote sensing services 

Computer telecommunications: Recent input/output innovations

 Reaching the market place in the fourth quarter of 1998 was an update to serial port technology known as IEEE 1394, Firewire 400 or iLink. Firewire went through an upgrade in 2003 becoming IEEE 1394b or Firewire 800, which doubled the speed to 800 megabits (800,000,000 bps). They are working on the next upgrade which is announced to run at 1.6 GB (1.6 billion bits per second). To quote Jose Kuhn, a computer specialist, "This is not your grandmother's serial port." Firewire is more likely to be used for devices which need very high data transfer rates such as portable hard drives and digital video systems such as camcorders.

A competing technology is USB. USB ports are used to inexpensively connect  a wide range of devices to computers. Nearly every computer has a pair of USB ports, and many have the ports both in front and in the back of the computer. The older USB version 1.1 can run about 1.2 megabyte per second and though much slower than firewire, its lower cost made it fine for connecting many devices such as still cameras, printers and scanners. In 2002 it upgraded its engineering standards to USB 2.0 which will allow data transfer at 480 megabits at some point in the future. Current implementations are much slower than the maximum speed allowed.

For both USB and Firewire, this means that any devices such as scanners, printers, still cameras and video camcorders which wish to use these new speeds will have to have their hardware changed or new devices will have to be purchased which come with the new designs. Speed improvements will continue to come along for both Firewire and USB. 

Optional readings: 

• IEEE 1394: Firewire ; firewire products
• USB.org explains the basics of USB and tracks products using USB connections.

Computer Output: Recent screen display innovations:

Electronic or Digital Books

Pro: readers can easily search for a specific passage; publishers could save money by ending the need for paper; such systems suggests the need for organizations whose sole focus will be on editing and qualifying creations; special options are possible for note taking and information organizing; creators could include more charts and images and raw data that is often eliminated now due to printing costs; readers can carry vast quantities of information; no shipping costs because the book is delivered via the modem built-in to the device; allows rapid distribution of books including many thousands of books no longer under copyright protection and now online. Con: speeds book piracy; tracking the more frequent revisions possible with electronic technology; legibility is still not the equal of paper; cost more; at their introduction in the summer of 1998 only a few thousand new book titles were available; this is little market for this in new books.. 

Optional readings:

• electronic or digital books

• Gemstar eBooks

Electronic Ink and Electronic Paper

Some forms of electronic ink can be printed on almost any surface, from billboards to flexible sheets of paper. Xerox says that its Gyricon product is, "...a rubberized, reflective substance made entirely of microscopic beads that are half black, half white. The Gyricon material is laminated between two sheets of plastic or glass and has the thickness of about four sheets of traditional paper. Before it can be used, Gyricon is filled like a sponge with oil. This creates a cavity for each bead, allowing it to rotate." 

Optional readings:

• electronic paper 
• Electronic Ink from E-Ink 
• How It Works 

Head-mounted Displays (HMDs)

Forget the book (which is a hand-held display), and just wear TV screens with your glasses. The standard for measurement in comparing the wearable devices that is emerging is the 2 meter standard. That is the width of view of different HMDs provides the perception of viewing a wide-screen TV with a certain width from two meters. The horizontal widths of 42, 52, and 62 inches are currently (January 2001)  being advertised. Though Eye-trek is currently designed for standard video displays such as those from television, DVDs and VCRs, high definition television and computer display will not be long in coming. By comparison with computer screens, these HMDs have slightly better than a 800 by 600 pixel resolution. Visit the home pages of these companies to see people wearing these products. 

Such technology would allow confidential personal computer display. This would also allow a wider range of computer applications to be integrated into hand-held and smaller computers. These devices also can provide the perception of being "in the scene" instead of viewing the scene from a more distant and removed perspective, an experience also called immersive display capability. Immersive capacity currently has immediate application in architecture, surgery and entertainment such as gaming and movies. It remains to be seen when such displays will be considered highly competitive with quality computer monitors or even the high quality of printed pages. 

Optional readings: 

• Eyetrek . (52 and 62 inch)  , $549 U.S. and up.
• Cyvisor . (44 inch)  , $1200 U.S.
• Several other products are also available. (Yahoo.com's index). Further numerous pictures of other approaches to head mounted display systems are also available online.

Mass storage I/O: Recent innovations

One critical part of computer development is mass storage, the storage of the computer's bits that cannot be permanently kept in computer memory and the residence for those bits when electrical power is turned off. Today's mass storage systems (diskettes, hard drives, ZIP drives, CDs, DVDs) that hold our applications and data when electrical power stops are based on spinning motors. In the long term, anything with a spinning motor in it is likely to become obsolete as new forms of memory are developed. Spinning motors are a major part of the weight of laptop computers, have an intense need for electricity and a fairly high potential for failure or breakage, especially if moved or bumped while being used. In the meantime, they are essential to the expanding needs for computer storage.  Mass storage is generally broken into two categories: fixed and removable. Fixed data storage refers to technology like the hard drive of the computer that stays put in the computer when its users goes elsewhere, often putting the information on a floppy diskette for transfer elsewhere.

Fixed Data Storage

Hard drive prices have dropped quickly over the decades. This drop has even been much faster than the drop in prices and increase in capacity of computer chips.  In the mid-1980's, 10 MB (millions of bytes) cost around $1,000. The largest consumer hard drive as of November 2000 was an 80 GB drive that sold for around $400.00 and that capacity doubled the following year for roughly the same price. By 2003, 60 GB drives were selling for $100. Going from 10 MB to 60 GB in storage capacity over 20 years represented a 60,000 fold drop in mass storage prices (Delong, 2003). In 2005, 500 GB drives sold in the $400 range. At the same time, these hard drives have become significantly faster. Writeable and erasable CDs and DVDs are also becoming common. As DVDs have far greater capacity than any other form of removable data storage, they represent the clear winner over the next two or three years for removable storage. It is reasonable to expect the current DVD capacity of 8.6 gigabytes per side to grow to 30 gigabytes or 60 hours of VHS video on one side. Multimedia developments such as hi-resolution imagery and digital audio and video require ever larger capacity disk drives. 

Based on current trends, it is reasonable to expect a terabyte of data storage for $100 in another few years while systems with a thousand terabytes (a petabyte) and more will be not be unusual. As just one example, this will bring unprecedented developments to the concept of diary and autobiography as people strive to store every waking moment of their lives (Piquepaille, 2003). Adam Couture, an analyst at Gartner in Connecticut, predicts worldwide storage capacity will "swell from 283,000 terabytes in 2000 to more than 5 million terabytes by 2005" (Hildebrand, 2002). The latter 5 million number is also equal to 5,000 petabytes or 5 exabytes. 

Mobile Data Storage

Removable data storage is undergoing numerous changes in media. Floppy diskettes are headed for extinction. They hold too little and transfer data too slowly for the larger files increasingly in use. Apple Computer stopped making them a standard part of computers in 1998. Dell Computer decided in 2003 to follow Apple's lead and no longer puts them in all new computers (Casciani, 2003) unless requested.

There are other more effective competitors for mobile mass storage. Removable "memory cards" are rapidly closing the gap with motor driven memory. Gigabyte memory chips have recently come available for use in digital still cameras and it is only a matter of time before general computers acquire the capacity to use them as well. Chips manufacturers are estimating that by 2005 the memory cards will hold 10 gigabytes of memory and become the primary form of storage replacing floppy diskettes, CDs, DVDs and ZIP disks. Sets of these memory cards could replace high capacity hard drives too. Removable memory cards are the eventual death knell of spinning motors in computers whose spinning drives are destined to become the dinosaurs of mass storage.

 

Image courtesy of Thumbdrive.	Image courtesy of http://www.futurelooks.com/

In terms of cost, they are increasingly competitive with other media but are not yet cheaper per megabyte. For example, a 32 MB flash drive could be bought for as low as $25 in December of 2002. It would take 23 floppy diskettes to provide the same storage capacity and if you can find the diskettes for fifty cents a disk, those 23 diskettes will cost $11.50. Of course, it is much easier to carry around one flash drive than 23 diskettes and the speed at which USB information is transferred is much faster than diskettes. A single 100 MB ZIP drive cartridge can be found for $8.00 but a 128 MB flash  drive has a lowest price of $79 (January, 2003). Overall these chip drive prices appear to be dropping in half every six months, so that at some point, flash drives will become the cheapest. To keep up with the latest in low prices, try the phrases "keychain drives" or "USB Flash drives."

USB drive technology continues to improve. The first drives were in the version of USB 1.1 which provides a great speed improvement over floppy diskettes. The new version of the flash drives uses the USB 2.0 design which is some 12 times faster. The speed of  these USB devices will continue to increase to their technical limit in the years ahead. The technical top speed is some 60 MB of data per second, which is faster than the fastest drives of any type in common use in the year 2003.

DVD and CD burners make a third category of common mobile storage. DVD prices have dropped to the point that the demise of CD burning technology is not far off, given that DVD holds much more data. Where CD technology holds a maximum of 700 MB,  DVD capacity has been in the 5-10 gigabyte range using the current red laser technology. Blue laser technology formats have been approved by the international standards consortium for DVD and will hold 15 to 20 gigabytes of data, which at the maximum capacity of this next generation means that some 3 hours of high definition television could be stored on one side. Companies have predicted such technology will begin to appear in computer systems in 2005 (Associated Press, 2003).

It should be noted that for most file sizes in use for standard word processing documents and still images, sending files to oneself or others  as email attachments, bypasses the need for removable data storage devices. Having a personal network storage account, such as for a web site, allows even larger files to be stored on the network for later use, though large-size file storage generally means having access to high speed networks so that they data can be transferred as fast as using removable media. With large files, what takes just minutes for data transfer with removable data storage could takes many hours with slow network access.

Researchers see even greater capacities in future years by moving to organic compounds, including novel plastics. One line of research is pursuing non-erasable technologies, fine for family pictures and corporate data storage, both situations in which the users do not want data erased. Another line of research will be erasable. Both approaches suggest that simple production lines will roll out plastic sheets that can be stacked for dense memory, instead of the environmentally controlled and therefore expensive settings needed for chip production (Eisenberg, 2003).

Cloud Data Storage

Cloud computing is a marketing term, a metaphor for storing information somewhere on the Internet or global computer network. The concept of the term "cloud" is meant to communicate that the user does not need to know where the data is stored physically. It doesn't matter; "your data is stored in the cloud". It is about providing access to computing power as a service, not a product, like water and electricity. The actual location is handled by the company providing the cloud service. You don't ask where you electricity is coming from; you just want to buy and have it delivered to where you need it.

Optional readings: 

• Associated Press (November 28, 2003). Japan's Toshiba, NEC DVD format approved by world association. Retrieved on November 28, 2003 from http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_475427,00030001.htm

• Casciani, Dominic (April 28, 2003). The rise of the keyring drive, BBC News Online. Retrieved on November 28, 2003 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/2981497.stm

• Eisenberg, Anne (November 27, 2003). On a Cheap Plastic Grid, Gigabaytes Galore. New York Times. Retrieved on November 27, 2003 from http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/technology/circuits/27nexx.html
• Hildebrand, Carol (May 15, 2002). What Elephant? CIO.com. [Online, August 3, 2003]
• Piquepaille, Roland (May 7, 2003). Mass Storage Leaves Microchips in the Dust. Technology Trends. [Online August 3, 2003, http://radio.weblogs.com/0105910/2003/05/07.html]
• ZIPs. The 100, 250, 700 megabyte ZIP drives from Iomega are common in many computers.
• CD burners. Prices for drives which can record 500-650 megabytes (approximately 1/2 a gigabyte) of data and more to CD's have been rapidly dropping. In slang terms they are called "CD burners."
• DVD burners. This technology is the replacement for CD discs and videodiscs. DVD now provides several times the capacity of CD's with the capacities including formats for 4.7 and about 10 gigabytes on one side and in the future up to 60 gigabytes on a format the same size as CD's. A DVD disc can now hold 2 hours and more of video of the quality of VHS videotape commonly used in video rental stores.
• The PC Technology Guide to DVD
• Product Trends For 2001 -- DVD Recorders: but coming in several different incompatible formats
• Making DVDs at home
• Removable memory chips for mass storage  Samsung Unveils Neo Memory Chip Growth Theory
• For cameras  pictures of a variety of memory cards
• More detailed Flash Card Pocket Drive background information

Product descriptions

• USB Drives (800 kbps speed, no software driver needed, 32 MB, $22.00, January 6, 2003)
• Thumbdrive, www.thumbdrive.com (no software driver required); a version is also available that uses a biometric thumb pad which protects data based on user's fingerprint, not on typed passwords.
• PicoDisk
• Pen Drive

Latest in low prices: 

• www.pricewatch.com (click the text that says Flash Card to bring up lowest price by category in the bottom window)
• www.everythingusb.com prices

Computer System Innovation

Many designs reflect the effort for the biggest. Designers combine as many mass storage units, memory chips and ever faster CPUs into one system. Supercomputers and massively parallel computers are one result of this line of thought. The World Wide Web and the Internet with their millions of interconnected computers is another. Other rapid developments such as designing the capacity to compose and display or use the most kinds of media have almost leveled off.

The other approach is to see what the smallest devices are that can still do something useful. Shrinking the size of components allows engineers to recombine the three basic components of computers (CPU, RAM/ROM, and I/O) in novel ways. Palm or pocket computers have been one step along this line of thinking. The designs of these Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) have converged with cell phones, creating products that some have called Smart phones. Using the same devices, users make telephone calls and make searches with a web browser. Further, this device automatically recognizes the available wireless signals, using wireless Internet signals or cell phone towers for calls which ever is better.

One of the more personal developments at the edge of change is the concept of wearable computers and wearable computer networks. The trend began with watches and is expanding across our wardrobes. "A person's computer should be worn, much as eyeglasses or clothing are worn, and interact with the user based on the context of the situation. With heads-up displays, unobtrusive input devices, personal wireless local area networks, and a host of other context sensing and communication tools, the wearable computer can act as an intelligent assistant, whether it be through a Remembrance Agent, augmented reality, or intellectual collectives" (http://www.media.mit.edu/wearables/, online June 30, 2003). 

It is not that big a step to envision our glasses (switchable as heads-up display), watch (providing numerous sensors reporting on our well being as well as reporting on conditions in our surroundings such as location, barometric pressure or altitude), PDA and cell phone in wireless communication with each other and other wireless networks, all at our command. 

As components shrink, even more options will be considered by computer and textile engineers to solve problems for our global culture and personal lifestyles. 

Optional reading:
---- (August 6, 2003). Boston Public School District Using Unique Mobile/Wearable Computers. eSchoolNews Online. http://www.eschoolnews.com/resources/partners/showrelease.cfm?ReleaseID=362.
 

Educators must also be knowledgeable about the educational values of current and coming innovations in technology and how they fit into those trends. This includes three major areas of a computer: the CPU; computer memory (RAM/ROM, etc.); and I/O, especially mass storage and communication between the computer and other devices. The shrinking of both the size and cost of computers will continue as the most visible measurements of the change in computer technology which impacts its educational integration, but not the only ones.

In this fourth of the ages of computing, the computer has three major parts or divisions that each grow and accelerate their capacity as new designs for their components appear. How should educators balance the teaching of four generations of thinking technology, integrate planning for the major trends in our fourth generation thinking tools and keep up with the evolution of our digital magic wand?

Lightly touched by this composition is consideration of how to organize learning, curriculum and instruction in light of such trends and 21st century technologies. How can or should we organize our communities and our schools to take maximum advantage? How can the use of these 21st century technologies enhance and accelerate our teaching and learning with even the most basic topics of reading, writing and speaking? That work is of such a scope that it must be left for a separate composition, Communities Resolving Our Problems - the Basic Idea, and book length works that address these ideas in greater detail. 

New understanding and new curriculum will inevitably emerge. It should now be clearer that in an age of accelerating change, educators have a tremendous opportunity and obligation to dig deeply into the numerous possibilities of fourth generation or computing technologies for problem discovery and problem solving. Further, 4th generation technologies should be used to revitalize attention with the first three generations. However, our overwhelming attention to our astonishment with 4th generation thinking technology may keep us from seeing a still larger picture. With time, we may need to return to the thought that the real computer is still a human being, that digital technology is merely one more new ally for the real computer, and that this digital ally has evolved far beyond its use in scientific and mathematical calculation. For in fact, the digital technology embedded in our desktop and other computer systems does not think and will not think with the human richness that should be associated with that term. Human beings, not computers, must be the hub around which we balance our needs for digital and analog thinking. Put in another way, the specialized support for thinking that digital computers provide is but one more important element on the palette for the more wide ranging and more significant nature of human thought.

Selected References (more in Bibliography)

ASCII Red (2011). Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCI_Red

Barak, S. (2011, November 16). Video: Intel's Knight's Corner, EE Time, http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4230708/Exclusive-Video--Intel-s-Knight-s-Corner#68553

Fuechsle, M., Miwa, J. A., Mahapatra, S., Ryu, H., Lee, S., Warschkow, O., Hollenberg, L. C. L., Klimeck, G. & Simmons, M Y.( 2012/02/19/online). A single-atom transistor. Nature Nanotechnology. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2012.21 http://www.nature.com/nnano/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nnano.2012.21.html

Hilbert, M. & López, P. (2011, February 10). The World's Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information. Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.1200970. Retrieved February 11, 2011 from http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2011/02/09/science.1200970

Houghton, R. S. (2011). The knowledge society: How can teachers surf its tsunamis in data storage, communication and processing? http://www.wcu.edu/ceap/houghton/readings/tech-trend_information-explosion.html

McMillan, R. (2012, January 24). Intel Sees Exabucks in Supercomputing's Future. Wired Magazine. http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/01/supercomputings-future/

Montalbano, E. (2011, October 11). Oak Ridge Labs Builds Fastest Supercomputer. InformationWeek. http://www.informationweek.com/news/government/enterprise-architecture/231900554