Why the iPhone Has a Head Start on the Future of Personal Computing

18.05.12

In 1989, I wrote a piece in one of my internationally syndicated columns about a mobile computing concept that was very modular. Back then, portable computers were pretty bulky and heavy and having to lug them around the world with me was a pain. That led me to think about what future portable computing might look like, and I took a stab at this idea of a modular approach to personal computing.

In hindsight this was ridiculously wishful thinking on my part more than anything else since the technology at that time wasn’t even advanced enough to make the then-current portable computers smaller and lighter, let alone modular.

( MORE: Bring Your Own Device: How Consumer Products Are Impacting IT )

At the heart of this vision was the idea of having a lot of screens available in my work and home. I envisioned these screens as being displays that my modular computer would plug into wherever I was. The most far-out thing I wrote about was the idea of the back seat of every airplane having a screen and the bottom side of the tray would be a keyboard. In my model, there would be somewhere for my “modular brick” (as I called it) to connect to this screen and keyboard and instantly make them “my” computer.

Source: TIME