So popular has the Internet grown that it seems nothing will escape its thrall, and even automobiles, refrigerators, stoplights and doorbells will eventually go on-line.
While it’s not certain what these gadgets will do once they’re connected, the technical ability to hook them together is beyond question.
Evidence was abundant Tuesday at McCormick Place, where thousands of computer engineers gathered for a national conference to celebrate microprocessors used in devices that aren’t computers, be they advanced medical imaging machines or digital cameras. The trade show is called the Embedded Systems Conference.
Typical of the new generation of gizmos being engineered for consumer use is something called an iCEBOX, a sort of hybrid television-computer intended to reside in the kitchen. It enables a person to watch TV or browse the Web while keeping track of muffins baking in the oven or who may be ringing the front doorbell.
“This is a second-generation model,” said Larry Mittag, chief science officer of Stellcom, a San Diego-based company that designed it. “We designed it for a company in Europe, where many homes are built around the kitchen.”
The iCEBOX enables a customer to monitor just about anything going on in the home as well as to communicate with the outside world, said Mittag.
“If the doorbell rings, you could switch to a video camera at the front door to see who’s there and push a button to let them in,” he said.
Other new products on display at the show include refrigerators and microwave ovens equipped with computer chips that let the appliances themselves know what’s cooking.
When a person removes a prepackaged dinner from the freezer, a bar code scanner makes a note, and the microwave oven automatically sets itself up to zap the meal at the optimal setting.
Even stoplights are being hooked into the Internet these days. Eventually, said Radhika Woodruff, a Microwave engineer, connections between traffic lights and driver-assistance systems in automobiles may be coordinated to help alleviate traffic snarls.
For the most part, engineering to hook together non-computer devices is going on behind the scenes, said Jerry Fiddler, chairman of WindRiver Systems Inc., the leading firm providing embedded device operating systems, based in Alameda, Calif.
“There are three elements of a network,” said Fiddler. “There’s the plumbing that hooks everything together and the servers that generate the content as well as the clients that people use to access the networks. Right now, most of the activity is at the level of the servers and the plumbing with only a little bit focused on the clients.”
That will change, said Fiddler, a Chicago native, in the next few years as infrastructure is installed to facilitate the networking of nearly everything.
As more devices are linked together, the nature of the Internet will change, and the prominence of personal computers as a means of accessing the Net will fade, Fiddler said. People may use wireless phones or pocket computers to go on-line, and they will probably have lots of seemingly everyday devices hooked in.
For instance, Fiddler has purchased for his mother a picture frame his firm designed. The frame is hooked to a phone line and each day it accesses a Web page to download photos Fiddler has posted for his mother.
Enthusiasm for the Internet among the engineers who design embedded systems seems boundless, but skepticism lurks beneath the surface.
Some engineers agreed, for example, that even with remote oven controls a person still has to put the food in and take it out. And for the second year in a row, the engineers selected a noted computer contrarian to deliver their keynote address.
Cliff Stoll, an astronomer and author, told a packed conference audience that all the hyperbole about computers and the Internet is gravely misleading society.
“I love gizmos, but I distrust the overselling of computing and the Internet,” said Stoll. “We’re making a promise to our kids that if they learn to use computers, they’ll get good jobs.”
The blind optimism about the Internet is fueled by bleak cynicism among those seeking to make money, Stoll said. Children shouldn’t be taught that using neat technology is a good and noble thing.
“This is cool stuff,” Stoll said. “But the real excitement in technology isn’t the gizmos themselves. It’s the process that takes an idea that forms in a guy’s brain and builds it into a motor.”
An audience loaded with engineers greeted this message with warm applause.
