From Calculators to Wireless Communicators

The computer was once considered a device for accounting and number crunching. Then it evolved into a device for crunching all types of information, from words and numbers to graphics and sounds. Today and tomorrow, the computer is above all a communications device; its primary use is the transmission of information between people.

In most workplaces today, you can use a computer to access business information without knowing much more than how to click links and scroll through pagesand you can do so without knowing which information is coming from your computer, which is coming from the server down the hall, and which is coming from other servers perhaps thousands of miles away.

Users who become accustomed to seeing highly readable and attractive pages of information on their computer screens are losing the tiny bit of tolerance they have left for cryptic icons, unadorned text messages, and idiosyncratic menu mazes. They have grown to expect their computer screens to always be as easy to read and interact with as is the Web.

Those who make their millions supplying computer software are well aware of that expectation, and are expending an unprecedented amount of research and development effort toward fulfilling it. Along the way, the central metaphor for interacting with computers changed from the "window" of the 1980s "desktop" to the "page" of the 1990s "World Wide Web." This metaphor is already changing to accommodate the needs and capabilities of users in this first decade of the new millennium, in which wireless handheld devices and networks are rapidly becoming a standard part of daily life.