Ben Delaney: What is CyberEdge Journal?

What is CyberEdge Journal?
by Ben Delaney

This article originally appeared in CyberEdge Journal #1, January/February 1991

When I was a kid, I used to wonder what it would be like to live in the future. I craved a modern version of Tom Swift's laboratory, filled with anti-gravity cars, talking robots, electron microscopes.

I never really thought I'd get to see it happen!

It isn't here yet, but the work being done in Virtual/Artificial Reality, Hypermedia and the like is darned exciting. That's what CyberEdge Journal is about.

CyberEdge Journal will promote communication and synthesis among those working to improve and optimize the human-computer interface. The line between people and computers is the line that remains to be crossed, the deprecation of machine and mind. That line, that edge, the cyber edge, is where the most exciting and important work in computer science, and art, is occurring. CyberEdge Journal is going to cover that beat.

Hello

We have see that many of the most influential developments in computing are those which affect the person/computer interface. When ENIAC and UNIVAC were invented, the way you talked to a computer was in binary;

01001000010001010100110001001100010011100010000001010 means HELLO.

It was a big step when Teletype keyboards and printers were hooked up. Finally we were talking to the computer in English. That is if MOV 1FB3 116C looks like English to you.

Dr. Grace Hopper did the interface a big favor when she invented COBOL, the first important "English-Like" programming language. It's still the most popular language, when measured in lines of code extant. That's because "Add Monthly_Payroll to Yearly_Payroll" makes sense.

At about the same time, speedy (for their time) Selectric typewriters were being hooked up to computers along with card reader/punches, tape drives and early disk pack drives. These improvements made a big difference on the interface by making it easier,more accurate and a lot
faster - closer to "real-time".

Talking cows

Now, for the first time, hardware and software are rapidly approaching the capability to provide a virtually infinite selection of interface designs and operating environments.

You like to swim? How about a aquarium/workspace. You're the top orca, your data is represented as guppies and the programs as sharks. You want talking cows? You got it. For the highly competitive, how about an interactive, multi-user operating environment that keeps score? (That memo's worth 10, the spreadsheet model scores 128, plus 50 difficulty points.)

Totally customizable operating environments for everyday use are tantalizingly close. Windows
3 has a nearly infinite variety of color combinations available, and supports virtually any device an office worker could need. Voice recognition/synthesis is available now, and its pretty good. Light pens, digitizers, mice, trackballs, isopointers, scanners, voice mail, FAX boards, LANs; they all make the computer easier to use, more customizable, more person-able.

Some of the most exciting options available now are the hyper/multimedia systems we're starting to see. Integrating live and recorded video, CD-ROM, audio input and output, "hyper" front ends and true color displays, these systems are here, today, and they're affordable. These types of systems will be among the "standard" operating environments of the mid '90s.

Office workers will be interconnected through hyperlinks that allow them to connect and interact in a natural, simple fashion. But they'll do it at their desks, not just at the coffee station.

The next step? We think that it's going to be a form of Virtual/Artificial Reality. The promise of today's nascent technology is to transform the world in ways that we can hardly imagine. The Holodeck on the
starship Enterprise is just one example of the sort of applications that will be developed. Surgeons will practice operations on virtual patients. Students won't read about the assassination of Julius Caesar, they'll be there. You'll be able to see if you like a new hair style, nose, or butt tuck before taking the plunge.

But what's going to be the winning technology? Our bet is on All-Of-The-Above. We're going to see an exciting fusion; Krueger's form tracing combined with Lanier's polygons, running on something outrageous from SONY, controlled by an neural-net-based expert system, with hyper links to the world's great information repositories. It's going to be Technicolor, 3D, Surround Sound, touchy-freely, real time, live and in person. It's going to be you, me, them, everybody, now and up close.

Does it run WordPerfect?

Why bother? Aren't keyboards and CRTs and boxes with disk drives good enough? Does it run WordPerfect?

There are two big reasons for all of this. The most compelling, and the reason that pulls us most strongly, is because it's there. We build better computers because we can; to see what they can do. We do it for the same reason we build faster race cars or climb mountains, 'cause it's fun, it's challenging, because it's there.

The second reason? Obviously, money. Big MONEY. The reason PCs and Macs are ubiquitous in the workplace is because they increase productivity. The new environments/interfaces are going to increase productivity even more. That will drive the market, indeed create the market, for these future technologies. And that market is going to be huge.

In the information age, the new labor-saving devices will be the appliances that store, cook, process, slice and dice data, turning it into information, entertainment, knowledge. The technologies we see emerging today will become so commonplace that you won't even notice them, like the dome light in your car.

Just as every home has a TV, phone, toilet and refrigerator, in the not too distant future, every home and office will have an unseen, powerful, unobtrusive computer, HDTV display, and broad-band, high speed, two-way links to the world.

Every information worker will have access to more information than they can possibly handle, and handling that information will demand techniques and technologies far beyond those available today. The seeds of those technologies are being sown today in the labs and universities where virtual reality, multimedia, hypermedia and all the accouterments are being developed.

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CyberEdge Journal will be chronicling this great adventure, providing a forum and sounding board, evoking discussion and, hopefully, debate. The synthesis of ideas spawns better ideas, so we will work to encourage dialogue among disparate disciplines.

Just as Edison's wax cylinder led inevitably to today's CDs and music videos, what we see now may be unrecognizable in these future technologies, but will form the foundation for them. We intend to report objectively on what's happening in this brave new world. We will keep you informed. We'll let you know what is on the horizon and what has recently happened. But most importantly, we'll follow your trail, because you are the pioneers.