UXculture

The Mediumlessness Is The Message

We live in times of accelerating change and major technology disruption.  Thinking through the implications of the changes underway can help us feel positive about the future. One of the biggest changes is the absorption of many media into digital technology. The rising capabilities and capacities of the microchip make it the ultimate mimic.

Today, content formerly housed in containers called books, records, film, CDs, etc, is transposed into digital 0s and 1s and reconstituted for instant transmission and consumption over the Internet. What do I mean by container? It's a concept so obvious that's it's somehow hard to see:

• A book is a container for storing and sharing pages and word
• A record or CD is a container for storing or sharing sound and music
• A DVD , Videocassette or film reel is a container for storing and sharing moving pictures

But the container matters much less, other than as an artifact, once these content types are transposed into digital files (bundles of 0s and 1s, much like software) that can be played on a digital device. 

Not just content types but devices themselves are being consumed and reconfigured by digital technology. A friend recently commented how remarkable it is that today one can take pictures and send text messages with a phone. But perhaps the confusing element there is the word "phone." Substitute the reality -- computer -- and it becomes clear. In other words:

• We make calls on a portable computer that we happen to call a phone.
• We take pictures on a portable computer that we happen to call a camera.
• We print pages and pictures on a computer that we happen to call a printer.
• And increasingly, we move around in a computer that we happen to call a car.

These names help us try and keep a connection to our pre-digital analog world, and surely they help us tell our computers apart. But in reality, digital tools, files, storage, and transmission are the order of the day. Microchips and the devices they power have become the mega-medium capable of replicating and refashioning an analog world in a digital representation.

These devices and containers used to represent different media, but today there is really one mega-medium. We differentiate through the old names and concepts. And the actually fluidity, dynamism, and speed of this medium -- once appreciated -- becomes something akin to mediumlessness.  Such is the hall-of-mirrors effect of the digital age.

Microsoft and Linux/Unix: Long Lost Loves?

What enterprising young tech whiz had a vision for a Unix-like operating system that could be run and enjoyed by PC users across the land?

Yes, in 1991, that was Linus Torvalds, who would use the Internet to pioneer not only a new PC operating system called Linux but also a new distributed, group-based way to create what came to be known as open source software.

But in 1980, that wasn't Torvalds but Bill Gates. Yes, back then, Gates envisioned a Microsoft version of Unix as the standard OS for all personal computers.

Unix was the multi-user, multi-tasking, mainframe operating system conceived at AT&T's Bell Labs by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie in 1969 and greatly enhanced through work at the University of California at Berkeley under the name BSD, short for Berkeley Software Distribution.

Microsoft licensed Unix from AT&T in 1979 (but couldn't use the name, which AT&T retained exclusive rights to), and announced plans for XENIX, its own version for the new microcomputer market, in 1980. In their book, Gates, authors Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews quote the "Microsoft Quarterly" at that time: "The XENIX system's inherent flexibility, along with this commitment from Microsoft, will make the XENIX OS the standard operating system for the computers of the eighties."

A few months later, IBM came knocking, looking for a very lean, very basic PC operating system. When Gates and Paul Allen couldn't sell them on XENIX, Microsoft bought QDOS (quick and dirty operating system) from Tim Patterson and Seattle Computer Products, polished it up and re-licensed it to IBM, and MS-DOS became the standard OS for IBM-PC and for its future clones.

But Microsoft kept its Unix pony in the OS game, releasing at least three versions of XENIX from the early to mid-80s and successfully licensing XENIX to Tandy and other leading PC makers of the day. XENIX proved one of the most popular commercial versions of UNIX around in part because its ready-to-go "Unix for PCs" configuration was a much more affordable option than other Unix license options and mainframe hardware.

Apparently, Microsoft even envisioned upgrading their entire DOS base over to the more sophisticated XENIX product, as suggested in comments Paul Allen made in the June/July 1982 edition of PC Magazine: "It's important to realize that MS-DOS is part of a family of operating systems.... Providing the user with a family of operating system capabilities means a clear migration path from MS-DOS to XENIX."

So what happened? Why do have Windows today and not XENIX? Or Linux today and not XENIX? In short, it seems that in the mid-80s, Microsoft decided that delivering a great user experience on the desktop, as Apple had done with the Macintosh, would be the key to the future. That seemed out of step with what was then the command-line focus of Unix. They sold  XENIX off to SCO, and focused instead on evolving MS-DOS into the current Windows environment of today.

During that time, Linus and his band of hackers hatched Linux, built in part on the new Microsoft-influenced reality of widespread PCs across the globe.  And since then, Apple has embraced Unix as its new underlying operating system, becoming the biggest commercial Unix vendor ever. But Gates and Microsoft remain very familiar with the ins and outs of Unix (it greatly influenced the evolution of Windows-NT.) And they may yet find some novel ways to benefit from the rising popularity of Linux and Unix.

A Piano In Your Pocket

While the piano represents an incredibly versatile instrument, it's not a great choice if you hope to entertain friends around the campfire. No, in that case, you would be better off with the guitar or perhaps the harmonica. But that may soon change, thanks to the new Hand Roll Piano from Japan:

It unfurls to 61 keys, runs on batteries, and includes an onboard speaker. And it rolls back up to a size small enough to fit into a beer can.

The roll-out keyboard is not exactly Steinway-worthy; it's not touch-sensitive or pressure-sensitive. Yet. But that's bound to come next. And it's equipped with a MIDI interface to connect directly to your PC.

In theory, you should now be able to sit in Starbucks with your Hand Roll piano, your laptop, your Wi-Fi connection, and your grande latte, and stream your virtuoso performances across the globe in real time. Yes, those years of practicing Hannon scales up and down the ivories are about to pay off.

Microchipping Animals, Products, and People

The development and use of wearable, stickerable, and injectable microchip identification technology holds far reaching consequences for our future. The technology, also known as RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tagging and scanning, provides the ability to identify and track anything and anyone, and furnish digitally encoded information about that object or being to a RFID-enabled scanner/reader.

In other words, RFID technology connects the physical world to the digital world. The possibilities extend far beyond pet recovery, inventory management, and point-of-sale strategies. By seeding the physical landscape with microchips, we encode it in a machine-readable format that can be integrated into interfaces, databases, and a global, networked user experience.

Two examples, fresh from the headlines:

• A grade school principal in California requires all students to wear RFID tags around their necks while in school;
• A Canadian RFID company called Advanced ID Corporation receives an order from the government of Newfoundland to use RFIDS for fish identification.

Clearly, the grade school mandate implies just the kind of "big brother" image that RFID critics fear. On the more optimistic side, we see RFIDs already being used electively to embed critical medical information for those with life-threatening conditions. And on the less-controversial side of RFID product tagging, we can envision a consumer landscape where products are smart enough to tell you about themselves. Nokia has already created a cell-phone with RFID scanning/reading capabilities for business use.

Since both the positive and negative potential for human-RFID tagging is virtually limitless, it's important for conversations about legal and ethical use of this technology to start today before it becomes pervasive.

In the post-desktop world of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) and ubiquitous networking (ubinet), microchipped devices talk persistently to each other and occasionally to us. As designers and users of the present and the future ubicomp-ubinet reality, let's make sure we're part of the dialogue.

Harvard U In Your Pocket

In a fascinating column in MIT Technology Review, Rodney Brooks, director of the AI lab at MIT,makes some startling predictions on the implications of exponentially expanding digital storage. "Any stable system can become unstable when even one component experiences exponential growth," he writes.

Like Moore's Law, storage capacities are currently doubling every year. At this rate, 20 years from now, we'll have 20 petabytes (1 petabyte = 1 million gigabytes) in our pocket. That, Brooks notes, is enough capacity to store every movie ever made in human history.

Among other near and far-term figures Brooks offers:

• Today's iPod could store the text of 20,000 Books
• An iPod 10 years from now could store the text of 20 million books, exceeding the entire collection of Harvard University's Library.
• An iPod 17 years from now could store text plus all images for all the books in the Library of Congress.

To make this exponential pocketable data usable—a knowledge of the world in your pocket—we'll need to refine technologies for viewing (digital displays), searching, sorting, and saving. But more importantly, from my perspective, we'll need new cognitive technologies.

Once the world of human knowledge is in your pocket, how do you decide what and when to transfer to your brain? And how do you transform information into insight and insight into action?