Date: March 27, 1997
Speaker: Bob Brodersen, UC Berkeley
The Network Computer and its Future
Abstract:
In the recent years a major discussion has been unleashed which focuses on a new paradigm for personal computing. This is built around the new "killer app" which has been found for use of computers, web surfing, which involves the accessing and the manipulation of multimedia data from the internet. The enormous growth of this activity, which did not have a significant presence as little as two years ago, has called into question the continuing relevance of ever more computation at the user's terminal. The alternative being put forward is that the terminal need user's terminal. The alternative being put forward is that the terminal need closely related communication activities such as e-mail, talk and in the near future teleconferencing. This has the advantage of being able to substantially reduce the cost of the device and thus open up the markets to a new category of users. The internal design of a unit to support these tasks, is most efficiently implemented with an architecture which is substantially different from conventional computers, since the primary function is the communication link and the display of I/O data.
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