My daily trauling of news sources today brought me around to this very old article:
Evolution, not revolution, in PC's future | CNET News.com.

What I found interesting about the images of future PCs is that they all look like bad sci-fi props. Visionary design my buttocks. PCs will never take a place next to your toaster, TV or stereo. They will take a place completely outside your vision.

They will become your house.

Do you ever notice your walls? Or more precisely, do you notice the wall outlets? No. Those are food sources for more interesting things. Computers are just like that. In themselves they aren't very interesting. In what they provide, they are.

So the future of PCs isn't to become more visible by creative design (with apologies to Apple, who have done some really neat things up to this point), but to become less visible by hiding in the walls, stairs and furniture of the home. The future of PCs isn't in what they look like. It's in what they'll do. And what they'll do is manage our lives for us. Not control our lives – manage them. The heating. The cooling. The entertainment. Even the feeding.

That is, after all, why they were invented.

Up until I got laid off I was working on the MiniMyth project. My goal was to stuff a little epia-M board into the bottom of a wooden “designer” box my wife picked up from a local home furnishing store. I drilled a few holes, shoved the required red buttons on the outside and covered the motherboard with a fake bottom. Now my MiniMyth client runs in a box used for storage of other stuff, like jewelry (the cheap stuff I buy my wife won't melt because the EPIA-M is so low heat it just needs decent ventilation).

Doing this I realized you can stick wireless communications on it and hide the whole thing in the wall. Plug the TV or VCR into it, just like an outlet. The mythtv server would go in a closet – too big to fit in a wall (but under the stairs might work). But all of it gets hidden. No one wants to see the machine. They want to see what the machine does.

This whole idea won't take hold completely until you get solid state long term memory – in other words, disk drives have gotta go. Terrabytes of storage on devices that don't have to spin or require movable arms will be the final bow of the old PC era. At that point, the devices become home building materials. And that's exactly what should happen with them. It won't happen for some time. We're just now getting to the point where hiding speakers and entertainment components in the walls is becoming available for the average consumer. But it's coming. And it's not that far away.

Anyway, I just had to mention this. Like I said in my last post: I got lots of time on my hands to think deeply about things no one is paying me for.