LISTEN To This Issue.

Quote of the Week.

Phoenix Rising!

On A Personal Note.

The Road Towards The Tiny.

About "The Harrow Technology Report"

LISTEN To This Issue.

 

Do you prefer to let your ears do the work of keeping you in-touch with, and thinking about where technology is taking us?  If so, "The Harrow Technology Report" is also available in an audio-on-demand, Web-based, MP3 version. 

If you have an MP3 player on your system (and most do, such as Window's Media Player, RealPlayer, etc.), clicking on the "LISTEN" link below will either stream the file to you, or, depending on how your system is configured, it might download the file before playing it.  Alternatively, if you specifically want to download the file, simply right-click on the "LISTEN" link, and choose "Save Target As..."

So, if you wish, click to LISTEN to "The Harrow Technology Report." 

 

 

Quote of the Week.

 

"A measure of progress from last weekend: Global Computer Supply had its weekend sale, and one of the features was 256-MB memory cards for $19. 

I realized that, for less than $100, I could equip my PC with more RAM than there was in the entire world, when I touched my first computer in 1960."

Ed Foster

 

Phoenix Rising!

 

As the title implies, this first issue of "The Harrow Technology Report" is a new beginning, a new way of continuing the discussions I've been having with many of you over the past fifteen years through my previous work as the author of Compaq's "Rapidly Changing Face of Computing."

But this journal, which is not affiliated with Compaq in any way, is going to cast its net far wider.  There's no question that advances in "computing" and its technologies will continue to power the incredible move toward "smart everything," but "computing" offers an even more tantalizing promise as the "enabler" for other, some completely new, fields of endeavor.  As these come to fruition, they will cause us to look back on today as if, well, we were now looking back on the "Days Of The Vacuum Tube." 

Remember (or imagine) what it was like forty years ago, in 1960: 

·    Color TVs were new to most homes; a "stereo" was rare, as people struggled to keep their monophonic "records" clean and scratch-free; everything that plugged-in contained tubes, which gave up an enormous amount of heat and insisted on "burning out" at the most inconvenient times, giving rise to an army of large "tube tester" machines in convenience stores for the fix-it-yourselfers.  TV repair shops dotted the landscape.

·    You couldn't legally connect anything to your telephone line except the phone provided by Ma Bell, and long distance charges were high enough that the egg timer by the phone still prevailed.  The first mobile phones filled most of a car's trunk, and only four conversations could take place in a city at one time;

·    The few portable electronic devices that did exist were fragile, and were powered by large, heavy, and expensive batteries that didn't last very long. 

·    DNA was a mystical word that had yet to give up any of its secrets, and most science textbooks still taught that the smallest thing around was an electron. 

·    And things didn't change too fast; companies were still making five-year plans, and it was pretty easy to decide that the electronic things we purchased would meet our needs for many years to come.

Telling the common person, or the high scientist of that day, of the reality to be, forty years later, would surely have been met with scoffs (or with straightjackets): 

·    Color TVs now fit in pockets, give off no heat, and run for many hours. 

·    Audio recordings have not one channel, but six or more, with a fidelity that is almost perfect, and they never degrade in quality.  In fact, they're played with "light," rather than with a mechanical needle.  In fact, color movies with a quality far beyond what the best TV could display back then, also fit on that same-sized silver disk.

·    Very few electronic devices ever fail within their useful lifetime; they just "keep on going" like the battery bunny that powers them (of course the software that drives them often fails more often than did the tubes of old, but that's another story...)

·    Telephone (even video) calls around the globe can now be "free," powered by a parallel, ungoverned global network that is so flexible that anyone can design a new service and introduce it to the entire world, overnight.  And many "common people," even school kids, carry a phone in their pockets.  Indeed, in some countries, pocket phones are becoming more numerous than their wired brethren.

·    Most school children (in developed countries) are now spreading peanut butter and jelly across the keyboards of inexpensive "computers" in their bedrooms.  Which, as Ed Foster implied in his quote this week, are more powerful then all of the computers in the entire world of 1960.  And those computers, through the Internet, are forming vastly powerful cooperative virtual supercomputers that, for some uses, must make "supercomputers" green with envy.

·    DNA is now a household word, routinely used in the courtroom to identify people.  And (many) of its secrets -- the coding of the human genome itself -- have now been decoded and are available for all to study and, eventually, to use.  Scientists are now routinely, literally, pushing atoms and molecules around one by one; learning how to build things the same way nature does -- from the bottom, up.  And we're beginning to learn to build things this way on a grand scale; teaching atoms and molecules to form themselves into just the right shapes to do our bidding, on their own.

·    Things now NEVER seem to stay the same for very long.  All of the fields we've just discussed, and far more, are swirling together in a synergistic soup that is roiling with ideas and possibilities, and it's routinely becoming possible to do things previously unimaginable.  Because now, every field builds on the quickly-growing shoulders of every other in an upwardly spiraling cacophony of innovation, invention, and ideas.

This is the world we now live in, and this is just the tip of its iceberg.  Which is what "The Harrow Technology Report" is all about.  In a way that we can all understand, we're going to keep abreast of many of the advancements in a variety of fields, and try to draw some connections between them that will help us not just survive, but prosper, in a business and personal world that is increasingly driven by technology.

Welcome -- to "The Harrow Technology Report!"

 

On A Personal Note.

 

My Thanks.

As "The Harrow Technology Report" begins, I'd like to acknowledge the tremendous groundswell of support and advice and assistance that I've felt from so many of you; it has been invaluable, and much appreciated.  And while I can't begin to thank all of you here, I do want to single out Dave Sanders for his artistic, aesthetic, and programming expertise that brought my new Web site, www.TheHarrowGroup.com , to life.  The differences between creating a Web site from a prepared template, compared to benefiting from a professional's expertise, were profound.  Dave's name and Email address are at the bottom of each Web page. 

I also want to specifically thank Robert Maynard and the folks at www.SendMeMore.com , who have helped get the Email version of this new journal up and running.

 

All Those Messages!

I've always prided myself on quickly answering every single Email I've received, and I've derived great benefit from your insights in those discussions.  But the many thousands of recent messages have quite literally, overwhelmed me.  I've answered many of you, but it may take quite some time to work my way through so many others -- not because I don't care, but because my fingers are wearing down from all the typing!  So if there's something specific you would like to discuss with me, please drop me another note at my new Email address:  Jeff@TheHarrowGroup.com  , and I promise to respond!

 

Scheduling, And The Future.

Exploring technology and sharing that with you, week after week, is truly a passion within me. And as you can tell from my bringing this new journal to life, it's something I hope to continue.  But I'm now off on my own, and I'm still exploring how to best do this in a way that continues to pay the bills, preferably without having to charge a subscription fee that would lock out so many readers. 

Towards that end, you'll notice that at least for the moment, the journal will be shorter than my writings have been in the past, and the schedule will be more erratic, perhaps loosely on an every other week basis, as I look for the best way to continue to engage you in this dialog.

Which opens an opportunity for you:  If your business would like to bring this work in-house to spark your employees' creativity, and demonstrate to your current and future customers and suppliers that you plan to be ready for the future, I'd be pleased to discuss this with you.

Or, if you're interested in supporting this work in some other way, I'd likewise be pleased to explore the possibilities. 

 

Invite Your Friends!

You can also help by inviting your friends and associates to sign up to receive this journal, by having them fill in the brief form at http://www.theharrowgroup.com/signup.asp  !

 

So, We're On Our Way!

We have a fascinating, evolving journey ahead of us.  So -- Let's Begin!

 

The Road Towards The Tiny.

 

Speaking of the convergence and bootstrapping of technologies, "nanotechnology" is one of those that couldn't be happening without the computing technologies that are making it possible.  And in turn, nanotechnology may drive computing and related technologies in fascinating new directions. 

Nanotechnology generally refers to working with things sized between 1 and 100 billionths of a meter, and that's just too small for mere mortals to contemplate.  Yet even with this science in its infancy, the ability to work with matter the same way, and at the same scale that Mother Nature does, holds incredible potential for almost every field of human endeavor.  For example, carbon nanotubes might form the basis of cables strong enough to reach into orbit.  They can form transistors far smaller than those made out of silicon.  And they might provide new display technologies (where these tiny tubes are used as "emitters" in a new type of flat panel display).

Other aspects of nanotechnology, such as those being pursued under the umbrella of Molecular Electronics (http://www.molecularelectronics.com/), may change the scale at which we remember our digital data.  According to the July 18 Red Herring magazine, 

"Molecular Electronics talks of releasing a product within two years. "We can read, write, and erase a single bit of memory stored in a molecular layer, and store the information for 10 hours -- 24, in certain packages," says Mr. Tour. "They switch a million times faster than conventional transistors," like those in an Intel Pentium chip. This advance is possible because the charges need to move only a short distance in such a small device."

On the medical front, tiny nanomachines are being designed by Quantum Dot (http://www.qdots.com/new/homeC.html) that promise to "light up" in the presence of certain biologic substances released by disease conditions, such as a heart attack.  These will aid drug research, and might eventually lead to very sensitive "tests" to screen for these conditions.   Or, consider "nanoshells" being developed by a Rice University spawned company called NanoSpectra -- these tiny "nanoshell" particles have a core of silica and a shell of gold, and they convert infrared light to heat.  That might not sound too interesting, until we see one of their early uses:  According to NanoSpectra's Halas,

"We asked, What if we could take this tiny particle, place it next to a tumor cell, shine infrared light on it, and create a photothermal effect that would induce precision cancer-cell death? 

Guess what? It worked in cell cultures."

These nanoshells are expected to begin clinical trials this year.

And unsurprisingly, nanotechnology may also form the basis of the new optical switches needed to handle the vast amounts of bandwidth that we increasingly consume:

"Lucent is trying to shrink popular MEMS switches to the nanotechnology range. Agilent is using miniature liquid bubbles to act as movable mirrors to redirect light waves, and Corning is channeling light beams through synthetic liquid crystals."

We clearly don't know which, if any of these tiny promising areas of research will pay off.  But it seems clear to me that now that inventive people are "playing around" at this incredibly small scale, a vast number of very unexpected "ah ha!" ideas, and results, are sure to emerge.  Nanotechnology may seem like the stuff or fluff of science fiction, but remember that integrated circuits and transistors were once just as improbable, and just as unlikely, as well...

 

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About "The Harrow Technology Report"