The MoPR Blog

Remember briefcases?

A long time ago, people would carry important “papers” around with them in small suitcases called briefcases. You would put these papers, sometimes in something called a manila file folder, something that strongly resembles the folder icon used in Windows.

Why did we carry papers around in suitcases? Because we didn’t have storage. Let’s go back to 1985. Computers were expensive and many didn’t have hard drives. We spent a lot of time working on hardcopies because softcopies were inconvenient. We didn’t have email, so if we were sending edits back and forth on a document, we had to print out the document, and send it on something called a “fax machine.”

There were “portable computers” but they were too big for briefcases. They came in their own case. We used the briefcase to carry the floppy disks with data and applications we needed to run the computers. That’s right, we needed two hands to carry our portable computers around. You know something else? In 1985, we didn’t have shoulder bags either. You really should read the MoPR Mobile Minute on portable computers to get the full idea. The bottom line, in 1985, mobile computing meant we schlepped around a lot of stuff, and it wasn’t always convenient.

But one entrepreneur saw real mobility looming on the horizon. Seeing that portable computers lacked portable peripherals, he created a self-contained printer that could fit inside a briefcase. His company was called Ergo Systems (of Menlo Park, California) and the printer was the groundbreaking Hush 80 – available in a parallel, serial and Commodore-compatible models.

When I say self contained, I mean aside from the power cord and printer cable, everything was inside, including a roll of thermal paper. The paper was treated with a chemical to make it heat-sensitive, turning the paper black on the area exposed to heat. A print head with seven heat-emitting dots would sweep back and forth across the paper creating characters in a 5 x 7 dot matrix. Each roll could print just over 100 pages and you never needed toner.

This printer was cool. Aesthetically, it matched the look of virtually every portable computer on the market. It was only 11 ½ inches long and less than three inches tall. Including 100 feet of paper, the printer weighed 36 oz. It was small enough to fit in a briefcase laden with papers and diskettes, and light enough to carry without adding tremendously to the already heavy (relative to today) portable computing load. In fact, the dimensions of the Hush 80 made it the only convenient element of a portable computer setup.

It printed the full 80 character lines. And because it was dot matrix, it also printed graphics.

You could either plug it in the wall or run it off rechargeable batteries – something new in the 1985 world of mobile computing.

The Hush 80 sold between $139 and $159. It’s only been recently that printers have fallen below that price point, and most printers today still cost more. Because the printer never needed toner, the cost of operation was also low.

The printer was well received by reviewers and it seemed that Ergo Systems was poised to launch into an early lead in the nascent mobile peripheral category. But it didn’t work out.

Why?

Well, one drawback was that the thermal paper came in rolls and the Hush 80 had no apparatus to cut pages in long documents. It drew a dashed line every 11 inches and users were required to cut their own pages, or crease them and tear them (which was rather easy, actually). Also, the thermal paper wasn’t the most user-friendly of papers. It curled, it smelled, and it would fade and discolor rather quickly. To preserve documents, people would have to make photocopies.

Although the price point was certainly attractive, it didn’t impact portable computing. The portable computers of the day cost more than $5,000 and were still a novelty in the business world. Today more notebook computers are sold to businesses than are desktops, and a sub $500 price point has spiked adoption of mobile computing in the consumer market. But in 1985, the number of portable computers shipped was still counted in the thousands.

Furthermore, the people laying out five grand for a computer were interested in different features than the Hush 80 possessed. The Hush 80 was quiet, inexpensive and portable. But power users of computers were seeking features like “near letter quality” instead. The 5 x 7 dot matrix Hush 80 had better-than-average print quality for its class, but was not close to letter quality.

The low price point was attractive to a market buying lower priced home and small office computers, but where the portability was of no use. Therefore there was no need to compromise the print longevity of the commonly used tractor-fed fanfold paper (is it too nerdy that I know about this stuff?) for the lighter, more portable but more inconvenient (in this context) roll of thermal paper.

But how many times have you been connected at a place like Starbucks, doing some sort of work and wishing you could print something out? Ergo Systems was a company ahead of its time. The founder and CEO of Ergo Systems was my dad, George Sidline. He understood more than 20 years ago – long before there was a mobility technology industry – that people will desire the ability through technology to have anything they want, anytime they want it, anywhere they are.

Mobile peripherals of course did catch on. Only today, most of these devices aren’t peripherals, they are built right into the computer.

And even though 20 years have elapsed, no one has yet made another high-quality portable printer. Nothing that will fit in my globebox anyway.

Did you have a Hush 80 printer from Ergo Systems? What were your earliest mobility technologies. We’d like to hear from you. Leave us a comment.

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digg it

I drive the 1974 MGB I drove in college (it was only 12 years old then). I restored it last year, and when I did I put in some improvements. I replaced the twin SU carbs with a single double-barreled Weber carburetor, put in an electric fuel pump and an electronic ignition system. More importantly, I put in a stereo that plays MP3 CDs and connects to my iPod. The Bluetooth hands-free earpiece, as dorky as it may look to some, allows me to talk and shift. As for mobile technology, that’s as far as my MG goes.

My friend Blair has a small British car too. Blair is a network architect and always has the cool toys before anyone else does. Blair is the first guy I know to connect two monitors to the same computer; different applications show on each one. Blair got a Mini, before everyone else did, and it has all kinds of fun stuff in it. I like the GPS system in his car. It’s not the first one I ever saw (the first one I ever saw was in 1998, in the Porsche of a different network architect who also got all the cool toys before everyone else did) but it’s placed on the dash in a way reminiscent of James Bond’s Aston Martin. He also has a Bluetooth handsfree system, but his is voice activated and connects to his sound system, giving every call a kind of “speaking with the Lord” quality.

Big deal, my sister’s minivan has all that stuff too (yes, but with far less cool factor), BUT she has a moving theater with DVD and 5.1 surround sound. Okay, a little bit more cool factor.

You know what I need in my next car? The Internet. I want my car to talk to the Internet. Use a Global Positioning System (GPS) or a Wi-Fi Positioning System (WPS) to tell a whole mess of computers where I am and come back to me with everything I need. For example, like where I am, what’s the traffic like ahead, what restaurants are up ahead, what do people who ate there say about them, how many of them can seat me and three colleagues at 7:00 pm, are there any hotels nearby that have last minute deals.

With the Internet, I could use my voice activated hands free with surround sound automobile Skype client, or voice chat with my buddies.

Put a printer where my glove box used to be (honestly, I don’t wear gloves) important documents can be sent via a network directly to my car. Last minute changes used to be made at the office, at a Kinko’s or some other location situated someplace other than the parking lot where your meeting is. Not anymore. The last minute will someday soon mean the minute right before.

Except for the printer in the glove box, I’ve used the Internet for all the examples above. Although I did print a document on a printer in Redwood Shores, California from a hotel in London, England.

A car connected to the Internet can get its own software updates (in case you didn’t know it, there is a ton of software managing your car right now, unless like me you drive something old).

When will we see these cars? If you’re reading this column, chances are you know or at least presume that car companies are already deeply involved in R&D of cars that feature Internet devices.

Daimler Chrysler worked with Sun Microsystems on a concept car – The Dodge Super8 Hemi – equipped with a Java and Linux-based Infotronic system, which they described as “a state-of-the-art embedded computer system, which was designed to satisfy the never-ending thirst of tomorrow’s automobile drivers and passengers for Internet-based data and information. The goal of the Infotronic system is to provide Infotainment, ‘edutainment,’ and entertainment services that meet the lifestyle of each individual driver or passenger.”

Dr. Wieland Holfelder from Daimler Chrysler explained: “We believe our vehicles provide more than just transportation: they provide personal mobility to reflect our customers’ lifestyles. Therefore, when a change in lifestyle occurs — such as the ubiquity of the Internet — we try to reflect that change in our products.”

This concept car came out in 2001 and Sun has been talking about Java and Internet in cars since the 1990s. So why has it taking longer than five years for someone to give me what I want in my car? Is it that far fetched to leverage “the ubiquity of the Internet?”

A company like iPass today can pretty much deliver you all the wireless broadband you need to make a car like this useful today. Between its 3G service and its aggregated Wi-Fi footprint, the company can deliver virtually ubiquitous coverage for where the vast majority of people with cars are driving in America.

Of course, unlike a laptop in Starbucks, cars tend to move fair distances in short spans of time. So what happens when a car moves from the hotspot of one network into the hotspot of another? Well, the session drops.

Not necessarily. With a mobile VPN from companies like NetMotion Wireless working together with connectivity over the iPass network, Internet sessions are maintained even as a device connects to networks of different providers or even different technologies.

The ingredients are there. I’m sure HP or Epson already has a glove box printer in the works too.

What do you think about the car as an Internet device? We’d like to hear your opinion. Please leave your comments.

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So, we’re spending a relaxing weekend at the beach. I’m working of course, using the hotel’s Wi-Fi connection (that’s how I relax) and my family is enjoying the sunset from the hotel balcony. My kids are listening to tunes from my iPod. Sheryl Crow’s Lifetimes comes on and my daughters both agree, Sheryl Crow is great. So I switch the iPod from playlist to artist mode, and they listen to a bunch of Sheryl Crow songs. All I Wanna Do comes on and they start to dance, telling me how much they love that song.

I love that song, too. I recall the album and the video very well and start trying to place it in time from memory. “It can’t be!” I exclaim to myself. So I Google it (free hotel Wi-Fi rocks!) and it can be. That song came out in 1994.

Whenever I encounter a moment like that, when something that feels like it should have happened just yesterday turns out happened more than a decade ago, I start to wax nostalgic about how the world has changed. This is one of those times.

Today I can get virtually any data I want delivered to my laptop virtually anyplace I am. If I’m sitting at a hotel, I can download and play almost any song ever recorded and pop it into a playlist on my iPod. I can tell my friends about the cool new song I just downloaded using email or instant messaging. And if I want to learn more about the artist, I just Google her. That’s today, in a world being blanketed by 3G and Wi-Fi high speed wireless Internet connections, municipal mesh networks and nearly ubiquitous commercial hotspots, like the one at my hotel. But that’s today.

In 1994 I was listening to music on CDs that I had to buy from a store. If I wanted to create my own playlist, I had to use cassette tapes. In 1994 I had an application called cc:Mail that allowed me to send text-based notes to colleagues (who worked for the same company I did and were inside the same building I was – it wasn’t exactly e-mail). If I wanted to look something up, I had to use something called an “encyclopedia” – a set of leather bound books which alphabetically presented you roughly 10 percent of the world’s important facts. Although my father used to sell these books door-to-door, the closest one to my home was at the public library. In short, I never looked anything up.

1994 was the dark ages.

But I remember something else from 1994: it was the year Metricom activated its first municipal wireless data network in Cupertino, California.

I wasn’t an executive back then, just a mere worker bee. So I could only admire the big boys with their fancy toys and imagine “someday, that’s going to be me.” Toys like the IBM ThinkPad 750 (which came with a built in CD ROM! No, you couldn’t record music on it, but it made installing software SO much easier) and 120 megs of RAM (which was a lot back then, trust me). There was still no email, but if there were, you could now use your notebook computer to send and receive messages using Metricom’s Ricochet MicroCellular Data Network, the first-ever muni wireless network!

It wasn’t cheap. Today Wi-Fi modems are built into notebook computers as a standard feature off the assembly line and you can get free Wi-Fi access in lots of locations, like my hotel for instance. And Wi-Fi can be as fast as 54 Megabits per second (but it’s probably likely that behind the access point is only a 1.5 Mbps DSL line).

But in 1994, there weren’t even that many notebook computers. That was the first year Apple sold the Powerbook. And modems of any kind weren’t a standard feature. If you wanted to connect even over a dial-up connection, you had to insert a card.

But still, the notebook held out the promise of mobility, and in 1994, Metricom wanted to help deliver that promise with a cellular-based data network for portable computers. First, you needed a modem. Metricom sold theirs at a discount to subscribers for the low low price of $495. If you recall cell phones of twelve years ago, they weren’t exactly the tiny palm sized devices we have today. They were big and had thick antennas, and so did the Ricochet modem.

But the modem could attach to the laptop, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. What’s more, it was so obvious you were using a wireless data network, that having that big, clunky box with the thick antenna sticking up actually made you look cool! Remember, only executives and rich people had wireless Internet.

Once you plunked down five bills for a modem, and a sixth one for service activation you had to select a service level. In 1994, there were four:

“Economy” - 2.4 kbps for $2.95 per month; “Standard” - 9.6 kbps for $9.95 per month; “Executive” - 19.2 kbps for $19.95 per month; and “Premier” – Unrestricted bandwidth for $29.95 a month (wonder how fast unrestricted was?).

Okay, let’s stop for a moment for a quick math lesson. 2.4 kbps? Let’s say it’s 1994 and you want to download the MP3 of that hot hit song, All I Wanna Do by Sheryl Crow, over your Ricochet network. The file is about four megabytes. A byte is eight bits. Your Ricochet connection can download 2.4 kilobits per second. How long will it take you to download the MP3 of All I Wanna Do to your computer?

It’s a trick question. There were no MP3s in 1994. But if there were, it would have taken you approximately 3 hours and 42 minutes to download one song. By comparison, if you were staying at the same hotel I am on the Oregon coast, you can download that song in about 35 seconds.

Fortunately, there were no great bandwidth demands in 1994 as there are now in 2006. No one was downloading music. You probably didn’t have email as we know it today, and if you did, probably no one else to whom you wanted to send an email had an account anyway. There was no Yahoo!, no Google, no MySpace, no Amazon.com. There was no World Wide Web (although in 1994 a fellow by the name of Marc Andreesen of a little-known company called Netscape predicted the World Wide Web would become a commercial success). In fact, I’m not sure what you could use the 2.4 kbps connection for in 1994.

Even so, here is how Metricom described itself in that June 1994 press release announcing the Cupertino network:

“Founded in 1985, Metricom is a leader in digital, wireless data communications networking technology. The firm, headquartered in Los Gatos, Calif., has developed a license-free, high performance, low-cost regional data communications network system that can be used in a broad range of personal computer and industrial applications.”

Industrial applications?

Metricom promised 30 regional networks by the end of 1996.

In 1997, by the time I had reached a certain professional status whereby I was issued a notebook, we were light years ahead of where the world was in 1994. I had email accounts at work and at home and there was a commercial World Wide Web (still no Google yet). And it was in a meeting in 1997 where I learned the great value of wireless Internet.

On one end of the table was the CTO of the company I worked for, on the other end his director of network architecture – the only two people at this company to have the Ricochet wireless Internet service. In between were two industry analysts who sat opposite me. Every so often during this meeting either the CTO or his director would tap on the keyboard and the other one would smirk. You see, by 1997, we also had instant messaging. But that will be the subject of another post.

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