Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 03/84 - checked

March 1984

It was heaven over Christmas, it really was.

I loafed around, saw some friends, sang some songs and forewent the pleasure of making my usual, horrendously expensive investment in the joys of British Telecom.

It is a time of year, however, when certain advantages do occur. The prime one is that, for once, the telephone stops ringing. For the rest of the year it warbles away bringing news of all sorts of jolly events; press conferences to attend, new computers being launched, companies going bankrupt: you know the type of thing. The telephone is, without doubt, one of the most I useful items of equipment that technology has ever managed to create.

Unfortunately, that usefulness is leading to its downfall. To be sure, the coming downfall of the telephone is only relative, for it will be a downfall only of what we see and use today. The 'telephones' of tomorrow will be radically different in their capabilities. Just talking will become passe.

The 'umble telephone, already shaken out of its low technology reverie by the introduction of such marginally useful gizmos as push-button dialling, memory dialling, last number recall and the like, is at last going to become the basis of the knowledge and information era that everyone has been predicting for it for years. Now, at last, the hardware is beginning to appear.

There will be those that hold up their hands at this point and say: 'But hardware like that has been around for years,' end I shall say unto them: 'True, but so what?'. It will be in this year, already so loaded with Orwellian 'significance', that at least half of the 'Telescreen' will come onto the market in forms that people can afford. It would not surprise me to see at least one computer/telephone machine being sold in a High Street multiple retailer before the end of the year.

Certainly machines of this type have been around for some years, in both prototype and in saleable form. The West German company Nixdorf, for example, had a system on display back in the late seventies. Nixdorf, a minicomputer maker, was also into PABXs, the local telephone exchanges used internally by many companies and organisations. On one such internal telephone system the company based a complete voice and data communications system that had, as its front end, a combination telephone and computer system. This had all the interesting attributes one might expect to find in such a machine. Not only could it be used as a straightforward telephone for verbal communication, it could also be used as a computer, and to transmit data, electronic mail and all that stuff around the staff of the organisation. Naturally, it could do these things simultaneously, so that one staff member could discuss data and information in real-time mode with another.

There were two major drawbacks to this system, as I remember from those dim and distant days: one was that the telephone system in West Germany, like most of the others around the world, couldn't cope with the level or type of communications traffic such a system would produce (if implemented widely); the other being that it was considerably negative in its cheapness rating. That is hardly surprising, I suppose. After all, it was one of the first, and at least partially experimental in nature.

Since that time, however, things have started to change. British Telecom, in common with many other telecommunications authorities around the world, has begun the long process of physically taking the information technology theories into the bosom of its corporate heart. The infrastructure needed to cope with the type of communications traffic smart phones are going to produce is now either in place, or at least planned for. So now, the smart phones dedicated to the purpose can start to appear.

No sooner said, of course, than done. One of the first to come to my notice has come from Televideo in the dear old US of A. This company, best known for its display terminals but with a recent track record of producing interesting business microcomputers, has just introduced what it calls a personal terminal. This is a screen-based machine, with keyboard and (admittedly still optional) modem and telephone attachment.

Another system, this time with in tegral modem and telephone handset, comes from a British company, BCD Telemail. This one has received a £200,000 investment from Imperial Life Assurance of Canada which is interesting, for once the likes of insurance companies and property corporations start investing in products like this, one can assume that the technology, the companies and the market are being considered relatively 'safe'.

What these latest introductions have in common with the Nixdorf system of all those years ago is that they are primarily directed towards business applications. This is probably only as it should be, for it is the business community that has the money to spend on purchasing sophisticated machinery that makes life easier.

But as with other aspects of computing, there are parallels here with the hobbyist/home user/computer freak and the influence of such people on microcomputers. As it was in the beginning, so it is now. It was the hobbyists and freaks that started the whole microcomputer business in the first place. Today it's the hobbyists and home users that are, through the introduction of such items as modems for Spectrums and Beeb machines on the Prestel-based Micronet system, leading the industry along.

Many companies in the business will not believe that there is a market for such communications-oriented hardware. Others will not believe that the time is yet right for such products. Others, still, will be prepared to gamble, and it is a gamble that I feel could easily pay off, and pay off now.

There are two immediately predictable types of system that can be foreseen coming from the industry. Equally predictably, they will be a business machine and a home user machine.

The business system is the easiest to specify, if only because all the technical bits of hardware and software needed for a basic machine are now available. It will be a complete box, incorporating screen, keyboard, processor/memory, disk drives and maybe even a printer. To this basic computer configuration will be added an integral modem and a full telephone handset system with all the necessary gizmos.

On the software side it will, for better or worse, require some compatibility with the IBM PC and need to feature some degree of concurrent operational capability. This latter will be essential if the slow speed of communication is not to constipate the machine totally. Ideally, it will have a more powerful processor than the Intel 8088 which powers the IBM PC. This will be able to emulate the 8088 for compatibility, but will be able to grow into other, more powerful operating system areas.

A major advantage of telecommunications is a dramatic increase in locational flexibility and so it is safe to expect a portable computer as an essential member of any serious manufacturer's product portfolio.

The home front machine is more difficult to predict, if only because just about any strange applications idea is likely to be successful. Here, the physical relationship between the two elements of computer and telephone could possibly be reversed. Instead of a the phone being an adjunct to the computer, in the home machine the computer could be an adjunct of the phone. The type of application where this structure might arise is anywhere the phone is used as the prime medium, with the computer providing essential, but secondary facilities. For example, this could be in the classic application of tele-shopping, where the bulk of the communication could still be verbal (if only to a speech synth/recognition computer) with the home machine providing the essential services of handling banking transactions, logging orders and printing out confirmation slips during the `conversation'.

This is a shift in emphasis that I see coming in much of home computing. For the present the computer is important in its own right, but I feel that will change. After all, we admire the labourer and the hole, not the shovel. For the games players, computers will be built into the television sets, and the games will come from the broadcasting companies (if they have an eye for a fast profit).

In most other home applications, the computer is similarly unimportant of its own accord. It is what the thing does that's important, and what it does will normally best be integrated into the 'where' it does it. That will mean a telephone that just happens to have a computer built into it.

All this could be academic of course. The USA is the single biggest market for products of this type, and in telecommunications that used to mean that American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) was the sole arbiter of what happened to and with the phone system. Now, as with the UK, the US phone system is being deregulated, and AT&T's monopoly is being broken up. One US company slightly pleased about this is none other than IBM, which has wanted to break into the mainstream phone business for years. Now it has the chance and is poised to take it.

There is just the chance that having IBM compatibility may not be just 'advisable' for smart phone manufacturers. It could end up as the order of the day. Ah, well.

end