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Technology Stocks : PC Sector Round Table -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gottfried who wrote (1529)	3/7/1999 11:27:00 PM
From: LK2	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 2025

Amazing news!!! Electronics devices of the future will be able to run without a central brain. (I guess the PC is dead, after all. All you people investing in box makers and their suppliers [disk drives makers, etc.] are investing in dinosaurs.) PS -- Does it seem a little funny there are so many recent articles on the struggle for domination between the PC world and the world of electronic devices? Is Microsoft a software company, and what is software, anyway? Is a movie considered software? Is a device that is smaller than 3 inches by 3 inches no longer a PC, because it's too small? Well, what if you connect that device to a monitor, and that device can do everything your old PC could do, and more? How much do you need a keyboard with improving speech recognition technology? If your PC lacks a keyboard, is it still a PC? For Personal Use Only >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> nytimes.com March 7, 1999 Sony's Bet for a New Generation By JOHN MARKOFF Sony's Aperios operating system, intended to control a host of consumer devices in a post-PC era, has been under development for a decade. Early work on the system was based in part on ideas drawn from Smalltalk, an innovative computing system pioneered at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s. Unlike Windows CE, which Microsoft designed to be compatible with older programs -- including the desktop Windows operating system -- Aperios was designed from scratch and so has none of the "legacy" issues that scientists say can clutter up software. Indeed, the basic operating system can be shrunk down to a tiny "kernel" that runs in as little as 100 kilobytes of memory, a tiny amount compared with the tens of millions of bytes of memory required by a program like Windows and less than one-third the memory requirements of a minimal Windows CE system. Sony figures that the smaller memory requirement will make Aperios attractive to makers of hand-held consumer devices, like so-called smart cellular phones and portable Web-surfing appliances. Aperios is a real-time operating system, meaning that it -- unlike Windows or Apple's Macintosh operating system -- can handle high-speed streams of video from a TV cable or a home video camera. Another feature that may give Aperios an edge in computing's next generation is called a "reflective architecture." That means the software can monitor its own functions and reconfigure itself on the fly as demands on it change -- for instance, as a user fires up a digital VCR to record a movie being downloaded from the Internet. Such flexibility is a key to Sony's notion of a world of digital consumer electronics devices that work together without benefit of a personal computer as the system's central brain. Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<