TECHNOLOGIES & PRODUCTS: Hot, Hot, Very Hot...

Symbolizing success and status, these gadgets are today's must-haves, more so for achievers & techies

Success spells class and brings with it some totems that have become today's hot status symbols. Whether it's the desire to keep pace with the latest, flaunt gizmos and look cool, or simply the use of technology for efficient working, hi-tech gadgets are now an essential part of life for every professional, especially in the IT industry. Handhelds to record day-to-day important tidbits, mobile phones to stay connected, and more comprehensive work-tools like notebooks to stay connected- these are gizmos that techies can't do without 

Hewlett Packard India has launched its first Multi-format color printer for photo-quality printing for CAD professionals. The HP Designjet 100 combines large-format and wide-format capabilities into a single device. It provides the versatility to conduct color printing in-house on a wide range of papers and media sizes without sacrificing speed. The HP Designjet 100 is available at a price of Rs 69,500. The printer also offers photo quality with up to 1200X600- dpi resolution using HP color layering technology. Its multiple paper paths avoid unloading and reloading media every time users want to change paper size-one standard tray for common office sizes such as letter, A4, tabloid and a manual sheet feed path for larger sizes lending to user convenience. Four individually replaceable ink cartridges make color cost effective.

Thales Navigation is working with Palm to introduce the first GPS solution for Palm users that provides 12 hours of continuous use. It features TomTom, CityMaps, and TomTom RoutePlanner. This solution enables users to calculate a new route on the spot, without a PC or Internet connection. Through the use of Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) and European Geostationary navigation Overlay System (EGNOS) satellite correction signals it ensures the most accurate position fixes possible so users know their location within 3 meters with a position update every second.

Dell has announced the worldwide availability of the OptiPlex SX260, the smallest and most flexible desktop computer in the history of the company. The SX260 weighs around 3.5 kg and is 50% smaller by volume than the existing OptiPlex small form factor chassis. It can be easily mounted underneath a desk (horizontally or vertically) to a wall or behind the optional SX260 flat panel solution. The chassis attaches flush to the back of the flat panel stand to blend the space savings of a traditional all-in-one PC with the benefits of modularity, such as serviceability. The system's swappable media bay accommodates any module from the Dell Latitude C family of notebooks, allowing users to share modules such as a CD-RW drive, amongst a mix of Latitude and SX260 systems. It is also Dell's first slot-less desktop computer.

HARDWARE: The Change AGENTS

20 years down the lane, this is DQ’s list of the HW and softwaare products

that redefined the tech-march

PDP-11:



The PDP-11 from Digital Equipment created a new era in

computing, and spawned an entire industry, the era and industry of mini

computers. The famous VAX series from digital arose out of the PDP-11, and the C

language was first implemented on a PDP 11. The first of the 11’s, the

PDP-11/20 came out in 1970, at a cost of $10,800, as a sixteen bit computer.

Interestingly, DEC at that time never called them computers, preferring instead

to call them Programmable Data Processors (PDP), because conventional wisdom at

that time held that the market for computers was not large enough, and they

anyway took too many people to operate!

CD-ROMs:



Ever tried installing Win 95 from the 15 floppies that it used

to come in? Old timers would. And what if the fourteenth turned out to be

corrupt? Ask the aforesaid old-timer and they’d have many a horror story to

recount. Forget the old timer, even today, people who go around with

presentations in floppies are leading life on the treacherous edge. The floppy,

like its name indicates, is a fragile medium, and that too with limited storage.

Rescue came in the form of the CD-ROM. Surprisingly, the CD-ROM wasn’t even

meant for distributing software. It was developed in 1980 by Philips and Sony

for music storage. The 74 minutes of music that the disk could hold converted to

approximately 650 MB of data, and proved to be a Godsend for the software

industry. The CD-ROM first appeared as a software medium in 1983. the 650 MB has

been stretched to 700 using the overburn feature on CD writing software. CD-Rs

have become cheap and are fast becoming the medium of choice.

DVDs have started moving in on CDs, the way they themselves started replacing

floppies three, four years back.

The Macintosh:



Sure, the PC changed the world. But for years, it played

catch-up to another machine — the Macintosh, or the Mac. Launched by Apple in

1984, the Mac soon became a cult figure. Its single USP throughout has been ease

of use, which is best exemplified by the GUI (Graphical User Interface) and the

mouse, both of which the Mac sported many years before the PC. And it had

plug-and-play, way before the PC got to plug-and-pray!

Unfortunately for the Macintosh, it remained a fringe system, thanks to the

closed-door policies of Apple. Briefly in between, others vendors were licensed

to build Macintosh systems, populated with Apples operating system, but the plug

was pulled soon enough.

The iMac followed the story of innovation, becoming the first system to be

USB only. In fact it is the iMac that made USB, developed by Intel, a popular

interface.

Mouse:



From minimizing a window to surfing the Web, you can do it all

with a click, thanks to the mouse. By making everything "just a click

away", the mouse has had a major part to play in the computer revolution.

The mouse too has come a long way — with one, two, and then three buttons,

rollers, and more recently cordless mice.

Where did the mouse come from? Douglas C Engelbart demonstrated the "X-Y

Position Indicator for a Display system" way back in 1968. The mouse had to

wait for 16 long years before finding widespread application with the Macintosh.

Today, you can’t even think of a computer without a mouse of some sort.

Today, we are exploring newer methods of man — machine interface, but the

mouse will be around for quite some time to come.

AS400:



Another legend in the world of computing, the AS400, is perhaps

the most popular and longest business computer. The AS400 evolved from IBM’s

System/38. It had two concepts, which made it unique and created a killer

system. First, a database (DB2) was built into the operating system itself, and

second, the system architecture promised that applications would be insulated

from changes in hardware. That is, an application once written for AS400, would

always run on an AS400. Recently, in a change of branding strategy, IBM renamed

the AS400 as the eServer iSeries. But the image of the AS400 endures.

Ethernet cards:



Today, a network is a given. And Ethernet will have a

significant if not complete share of the network. With technologies like ATM and

FDDI being restricted to the backbones or to specialized networks that require

high bandwidths, Ethernet is today the only option that spans the entire

spectrum — covering small, medium, and even large networks.

Bob Metcalfe — the inventor of Ethernet named it so, after ether, the

medium that was once thought to permeate everything, to signify that it could

carry signals to all types of computers. This is something Ethernet does with

consummate ease even today. In keeping with the times, it’s grown from

transfer rates of 10 Mbps to 100 Mbps and with Gigabit Ethernet — to 1,000

Mbps. Without Ethernet, the world would surely have been a different place.

PC+DOS:



The terms PC and computer are used interchangeably. That in

effect, sums up the impact that the original IBM PCs had on computing. It took

computing away from being something that could be done only by a few

institutions that had the millions to invest in a mainframe, and converted it

into something that you and me cannot live without. The PC was also the first

computer to have an open architecture, letting others to add features to the

machine by way of add-on cards. This architecture is one of the reasons why it

became so popular, and more importantly, laid the foundations for a

multi-multi-billion-dollar industry. The world was never quite the same again

after the first PC was introduced in 1981.

The Modem:



Man is a communicating animal. Some of the greatest inventions

of all time, including the telephone and the television, have risen out of his

need to communicate. Extending the role of the telephone into the cyber world is

the modem.

Starting off as a now-lowly 300 bps "modulator-demodulator", the

modem’s come a long way indeed in connecting up the world — first to

bulletin boards and then to the Internet. As connect speeds increased, so did

the varieties and technologies in modems, all the way through ISDN and up to DSL.

Sound Blaster Sound Card:



All PCs today are multimedia capable. That is,

they can run video and animations, and can reproduce audio. It’s the Sound

Blaster card that made multimedia possible and affordable on the PC. The early

multimedia kits from Creative — incorporating a sound card, a CD-ROM drive,

and a pair of speakers — were hot sellers, as PC users raced to extend their

machines into the new frontier of multimedia. In fact, for a couple of years,

multimedia (represented by a CD-ROM drive, a sound card and two speakers) was

considered to be the prime driver of computing, particularly for the home

market, and every other vendor had to be SoundBlaster compatible.

Now, you no longer require a separate card if you are not into professional

sound work. Sound capability is beginning to be built into the motherboard and

the chipset itself. But the Sound Blaster will have a special place in personal

computing history for having ushered in the age of affordable multimedia.

Tape storage:



If you happen to see photographs of old mainframes, what’ll

strike you will be the spools of tape loaded on them. The visual prominence is

indeed matched by reality. Tape storage has had a very critical role to play in

computing, almost from the very beginning. Consider this. Before the advent of

tape, the option was paper! Remember the punched cards and the paper tapes that

computers and calculators of yesteryears used?

One of the disadvantages of tape is that it’s sequential access technology,

and is therefore slow. But when it comes to taking backups, this works out to be

an advantage. Also, the compact nature of tape makes it possible to store very

large volumes of data in very little physical space.

Today, tape-based backup devices support the entire spectrum of computers

from desktop computers to enterprise servers and mainframes. Like good wine,

tape technology has also improved with the passage of time, and as yet there’s

nothing yet on the horizon that can replace tape as the preferred option for

mass backup.

Software

C++:



First, there was programming. Then came structured programming.

And then, with C++, came object oriented programming. Today, all mainstream

languages implement the object-oriented way of writing code. To put it very

simply, you associate actions to objects. These objects, once created are

reusable across projects. One of the primary advantages of this method is that

time required for writing code comes down drastically. C++ was written by Bjarn

Stroustrup in 1983, and has attracted an increasing number of adherents since

then, going strong even today.

PKZip:



The "PK" in PKZip stands for Philip Katz, the author of

the program. PKZip was by no means the first compression utility. But when it

was released in 1989, it soon became the most widely-used compression software,

and the common name for compressed files — zip files comes from PKZip. PKZip

owes its popularity to Katz’s decision to make his software widely available

by distributing it as shareware.

PKZip missed the Windows bandwagon, with a Windows version coming out quite

late in the day. This lead to WinZip becoming the defacto file compression

utility for Windows.

Java:



When compiled programs seemed to have firmly established their

ascendancy over slow interpreters, Java bucked the trend and went back to the

days of interpreted languages. But simultaneously, Java also bucked the trend of

writing platform-specific code and then going through the laborious process of

porting it to other platforms. It held out the promise of code that could run on

any platform, without any changes whatsoever. To the programming community still

coming to grips with the profusion of Oss on the Net, Java was indeed a godsend.

Today, Microsoft, with its .Net is trying to challenge Java, but there is no

doubt that Java has indeed changed the way programming for the Net has evolved.

Lotus 1-2-3:



When the PC first came out, it was nothing more than a

potential killer device waiting for the killer application — the application

that would prove to the world its true potential, the application without which

the PC would never have become the PC as we know it today. That killer

application turned out to be Lotus 1-2-3. The "1-2-3" in the name

stands for the three applications that were built into the product–namely

spreadsheet, graphing, and database. It was programmed by Jonathan Sachs, and

Mitch Kapor was the software designer.

Making its debut in 1983, two years after the advent of the PC, 1-2-3 proved

that the PC could have more to it than the calculators that were its

predecessor. For many years, 1-2-3, and Lotus ruled the roost. In fact. Lotus in

those days was a major force to reckon with, with the company having major say

even in PC specs, as is evidenced by the LIM (Lotus-Intel-Microsoft)

specifications on expanded memory.

Linux:



A variant of Unix, Linux has been a joint effort of developers

worldwide, who over a decade, built up a lean and sturdy OS that can take on the

best that commercial vendors have to offer. The most significant of Linux’s

many claims to fame is that it fueled a new paradigm in software development and

distribution — the now-widespread Open Source movement.

Today, Linux poses a significant challenge to all other operating systems,

both on the server and on the desktop, and is the fastest growing OS on the

server. One of the reasons why it’s able to throw an across-the-board

challenge is that it’s been ported to almost all hardwae platforms available,

including the latest as well as the most esoteric.

E-mail and Instant messaging:



If the browser is what brought the wonders

of the Internet alive to millions of users, it is email that unleashed the

potential that the net promised —instantaneous and cheap communication. Email

was the killer application on the net till instant messaging came along, and

replaced the near instantaneous communication offered by email witha

instantaneous communication to anywhere across the globe at the cost of a local

call.

Together with SMS, Email and instant messaging has changed the way we

communicate, and our lives like never before. They have even brought in a

completely new vocabulary into the language

Windows ’95:



When we talk of Windows, we normally mean Windows for the

personal desktop, currently WinXP. But there are many other versions too. There’s

the server version — originally called Win NT, which then became Windows 2000

Server, and is now poised to become the Windows.Net server.

On the desktop, Windows has built up a dominant mind and market share. This

started happening with Windows 95. The switchover from Windows 3.11, which had

to be installed over DOS, to Windows 95, with its better GUI stability and ease

of use, along with the advent of powerful Pentium class processors from Intel is

what heralded the advent of home computing.

Netscape Navigator:



Mosaic was the first Web browser to provide a

graphical front-end for browsing the Internet. But Netscape is solely

responsible for making the first of many million people hook on to the World

Wide Web. Netscape started to add new features to the browser at such a furious

pace that Mosaic was soon left far behind. Anyway, for a long time, Netscape

Navigator, as it was known then (it became the Communicator subsequently, with

Navigator being one of the components) was the only Web browser that was

available to users, although most had to pay for it. Later, as it faced

competition from IE, Navigator also became free, and still later, even the

source code was made open, with Mozilla becoming an opensource effort to create

an entirely new browser starting off with the original Netscape code. Netscape

as a company does not exist anymore, and Navigator has become a minor browser in

the larger game. But no-one can deny its rightful place in computing history–as

the browser that opened the floodgates to the Internet.

The Future Belongs to Them...

The

TALKING DESKTOP CALCULATOR is the hottest new invention in audio chip

technology. A person in talk with his accountants can let the whole room know

what entries he is making and what the results were; a clear English-speaking

female voice announces every keystroke , so it verifies everything you do. Talk

about fail-safe calculations! There’s a 10-digit LCD display, voice volume

control and shutoff, time and date display, and a clock with an alarm that gives

you a verbal reminder or sounds musically if you like (there’s a selection of

15 tuneful melodies). It’s a great teaching tool for young children–and what

a terrific gift for the vision impaired! A folding pocket-sized version of the

10-digit talking calculator has all the same features, with room for a favorite

photo.

This

SIMPLE HANDHELD "EMOTION READER" uses scientific principles to

analyze a "profile" of someone’s voice and measures stress levels

and conflict. So when your daughter calls you on your cell phone to tell you she’s

baby-sitting for a neighbor, you’ll know if she’s out with her friends

beyond curfew. You can also discover whether a salesman or business affiliate is

telling you the truth, or check your own voice before an important interview.

The results can’t be validated as legal evidence in a court of law, but you

can get a decided advantage before any transaction. Voice measurements include

the actual words spoken; the unique elements in every voice; the expressions

used; and the levels of excitement, conflict and stress, among others. The LCD

displays 9 levels from "truth" to "false statement," and 9

levels of stress. You can use it in handheld mode or with a cell phone.

In

its sleek new design, the PEN CAM PLUS has all the features of the

ultimate spy camera, and even more. It still outperforms many full-size digital

cameras, lets you take high quality pictures in digital camera mode, create your

own mini-movie with the digital camcorder and use the PC mode to broadcast live

footage on the Web. Here’s what’s new: 64 MB SDRAM instead of 16 MB;

80-image storage capacity instead of 20; a slim, futuristic look and a brand new

price.