by Brian Grainger: brian@grainger1.freeserve.co.uk

I was going to call this article 'The Death of the Personal Computer' but it sounded familiar. I decided to look at the old paper newsletters and there it was in Volume 18 No. 4, back in August 1996. I read the article again and had a laugh. I am going to reiterate a few paragraphs here about what I called my daymare, (as opposed to nightmare). It shows how prescient I was!

'I am having one of my regular clearouts. I come across an old booklet. In big friendly letter on the front it said ICPUG. That brought back memories of when I used to have a computer and belong to a user group. I wrote articles for the newsletter. I used to promote a programming language called COMAL, which made it easy to make the computer do what was required, and offer free programs. I can remember when I used to return from holiday and find it difficult to open my front door because of the jiffy bags of disks that members had sent for their free software.

'It all died away though. Members of the club started to comment that articles were too technical, even when there was hardly any technical content left! People never really got the hang of computers. Despite their usefulness if you put in a little effort, it seemed they were always too difficult to understand no matter how easy things got.

'Then along came the Internet. It was difficult to use at first, but eventually it was easy. Now you buy a box to connect to your TV, turn on, and that is it. No need to buy games now, just connect to the premium page games area and play online. Of course if you want to write some messages to send to your friends you need an additional keyboard to connect to the box so that you can interact with the online word processing software. If you want to store information you can even rent storage area for a monthly charge. The latest music can be heard online and if you like what you hear you can download it to your CD-ROM recorder for enjoyment offline. There is lots of information of course including the daily news, but because children can access the Internet it is heavily censored. The newspapers, along with newsagents, died away from too little need. Groups similar to the old ICPUG have their own pages and members can converse with each other online. You run your bank account through the Internet. Initially it was an alternative to the high street branches but as more and more people got to use it and the banks realised the potential savings to be made, the branch networks died out. There is a huge amount of information but I am not sure how useful it all is. I seem to spend a lot of time browsing stuff just because it is there and a lot of it is so out of date. When I want something specific I can spend ages trying to find it amongst the rest of the stuff. Mind you, I do not know where we would be without the Net. No news, no bank account, no amusements. It must be dreadful to be out in the sticks where they are not wired up, or one of the eight million unemployed, or one of another disadvantaged group who cannot afford it.'

OK, a few of the suggestions have yet to come to pass but they do not seem too far away. Closest to home, the ICPUG journal only exists via the web. MP3 allows music to be heard online. CD-ROM recorders are now cheap enough to be used as suggested. The Prudential Egg bank account can only be opened via the Internet and there is a lot of useless information hiding the good stuff! However the bit I want to concentrate on is the bit that mentions the complexities of the PC and the box connected to the TV.

A number of events have happened recently to suggest that maybe PC usage, at least in the home, is probably at its height. First of all here are some examples that have come to me personally.

A friend of a friend had a PC and wanted Internet access. They asked my advice and I suggested a certain make of modem and to get a Freeserve account. The PC they had was well specified and Freeserve is very easy to set up for the beginner. However, I failed to take into account BT. For some reason, which I believe was connected with a poor telephone line, after the software had installed the system would not connect to the Freeserve server. However the user had been asked for an ID and password, the Windows 95 user setup, so they thought all was well. They then tried to e-mail and failed. At this point I was called and I spent a few lengthy phone calls trying to ascertain what had happened. I found the user had put the PHONE NO. of the person being e-mailed into the dial up networking properties. I eventually got all the settings for Freeserve installed manually but it still would not connect. By chance it became necessary for them to visit me with the PC. When I tried to connect from my home there was no problem, which is why I assumed it was a poor phone line originally. Anyway, the Freeserve account was set up and I gave a brief tutorial on logging into the web and how to e-mail. They now seem to be OK at there own abode. Now the question I ask is, if I had not been available how would this problem have been solved? No technical help line would have solved this fault without visiting the computer. The user would have had a poor impression of getting onto the Internet and may well have given up.

My second example concerns another friend, a senior citizen, who has been using a PC for a while now. It replaced a Commodore 64. He rang me because he had an item on his start menu that was duplicated and he wished to delete one of them. I had been through the procedure before with him but he did not know how to repeat it. In order to make sure I deleted the right duplicate, (they were not quite the same), I asked him to open Windows Explorer with the intention of finding the two items and then looking at the properties to see where the shortcuts were pointing. This was a big mistake. The gentleman in question had a habit of moving the mouse when he clicked the left mouse button. When he did it the first time he moved the
\windows\start menu\programs folder into \windows\sysbackup. Then he moved \windows\sysbackup into \windows\system. By this time I was telling him to leave the mouse on the mouse mat (free from his hand) and tap the left mouse button. He still managed to move another folder. I was spitting feathers by this time and eventually I managed to solve the original problem and get things in a working state. What should have taken two minutes took an hour. My friend was not to blame. Clearly the mouse is not an easy to use peripheral for everybody. I suspect that reducing its sensitivity might help but how does your novice PC user know how to do this. They usually accept default settings and make do.

Both the above cases highlight the fact that PCs are NOT easy to use by the non-technically minded. There are no doubt a lot of home users who are getting by using their PC for word processing or surfing the net but who are not using them efficiently. I have often wondered whether those who word process a lot would be better off with something like a Brother typewriter. You turn it on and you type. It has the common editing facilities of a word processor. Nothing could be simpler.

Now I think we can all agree that the Internet is an essential tool that everybody must have, otherwise you would not be reading this. However our means of access is really complicated when you think about it. First you have to buy a PC. When you turn it on it eventually displays a desktop where there is no indication how to access the Internet. In fact you have to buy a modem, some software, get an ISP and then install this lot and sign up. This is incredibly complicated for a novice.

Things are slowly beginning to change. Let us trawl through some of the stories of recent times.

Quite a while back the Commodore 64 made a comeback as the Web-It 64
(see http://www4.icat.com/store/cse/index.icl?execute=index.icl&Colocode=icat for details).
The former home computer is now being marketed as a tool for accessing the Internet.

Services are beginning to appear where e-mail can be redirected to pagers, mobile phones and faxes. Freeserve have now started a service where you can listen to your e-mails down a normal phone line.

Those multicoloured boiled sweets, I-Mac to the raincoat aficionados, seemed a strange item when they first appeared. They were supposedly computers but they did not come with any medium for offline storage. Recently Jack Schofield, the Guardian's Computer writer who also writes for the trade press, suggested that the I-Mac was really an Internet device, not a computer at all. He got a lot of flack from the Mac followers but it makes a lot of sense. It is marketed as the easiest way to get on the Internet. You are expected to use the Internet, rather than offline storage, as a means of transferring information. Finally it was a bit cheap for a Macintosh computer, but expensive for an Internet device. That clinches it for me; it must be an Internet device!

Those of you who have been checking the 'What's New' page regularly will know I have been putting up stuff about the plans of Amiga Inc. They are going to concentrate on software for Internet appliances.

Sony's Playstation 2 will come with modem capability when it appears next year. It will no longer be just a games machine.

Finally Dixons, the high street retailer behind Freeserve, plans to launch a web access and e-mail machine before Christmas, for around £200. In the US Microworkz already has such a device, the iToaster.

What do all these stories add up to? Well, your average Joe Public looks at places like Dixons for their hi-tech equipment and Playstation is already a well-known brand name. These Internet devices are going to be the obvious thing to buy, especially when they are a lot cheaper than a PC. Once such a device is bought it is more likely that any peripherals that are needed will be bought later as add-ons. What will be the point of buying a PC?

There is another point to consider as well. With the advent of cable TV and digital TV there is now a completely new distribution medium independent of the Internet. What is more it uses a device that everybody already has, the TV. Those of you with Sky Digital will know that they are launching an interactive TV service, which amongst other things will allow a user to run a current account from his armchair. Various high street stores are gearing up to sell via this medium as well. Once they have found a way to send and receive e-mail you have probably covered the needs of a significant number of home users. Once again they will no longer consider a PC as relevant. I must admit that with the size of PC monitors increasing I prefer an option where I ditch the TV and watch it on my computer, rather than try and mimic computer functions on the TV. However, I know I am in the minority here.

The conclusion I am inevitably drawn to is that the current generation of PCs is probably the last that will be ubiquitous in the home. A variety of different devices that you will just turn on and go will replace them.

Despite forming this conclusion there is already one problem I can envisage. As you trawl the net you will come across sites that want you to download certain add-ons so that you can view the site - Shockwave Flash immediately springs to mind. However, if you have a set top box to surf the web how do you view such sites? You cannot upgrade the capabilities of a set top box. Perhaps my dream will come true and sites will stop using such technologies, (so speeding up the net in the process), but more likely set top boxes will constantly be upgraded. After all, where would we spend all that money released by not purchasing PCs!