Incremental Blogger

Gates 1991 keynote on pen computing

Andrew Grumet's thoughts on Tablet PCs mentioned in the previous post were spawned by an audio recording of Bill Gate's keynote at ADAPSO in 1991 that Dave Winer posted. In the keynote, Bill Gates talks about the current state of pen computing and its future.

It's worth listening to the whole recording--simply from a historical perspective. It shows how far we've come and how far we haven't.

I thought the pen computing segment was so interesting that I transcribed it.

Before I get to the transcript, let me set some context using some info pulled from the recording...

Most people are running DOS on a 386 machine. In the year 1991 20 million DOS/Windows systems were sold, 2 million Apple systems, and 250,000 Sun computers. The 486 was still a high-end system and as Gates mentions in his keynote, "1-Gb logical address space should prove adequate for personal computer applications for the rest of the decade."

If you got a chuckle out of this, you'll probably enjoy Gates comments on pen computing (It starts just before the 22 minute mark in the recording):

...I have a slide here, specifically talking about the move towards the pen as an input device because I think it is a great illustration of how things are changing. The pen promises to bring personal computing to areas that it’s never seen before. For example, at a meeting like this I would expect maybe next year but certainly two years from now a high percentage of the people to be here with a tablet-based computer and taking notes looking at your information and working on a purely electronic basis.

The pen is an amazing device. I think everybody that’s gotten involved in working with pens finds that they have far more impact than sort of the simple mouse replacement or keyboard substitute that you might think of them being at first. The idea that you’re right there at the surface of the machine pointing at the data, circling that data, gives you a level of accuracy that simply was never possible with the indirect approach of working with the mouse. And so we have now the idea of gestures to give common commands. We have the idea of simply using ink where you annotate things and not worrying about having the computer have to recognize that. Simply leaving it there so that it passes through the storage system out across the network to all the different users. That information is there for somebody else to look at. And we even have this idea of text recognition. As the two primary operating systems in this area have opened up their interfaces to allow anybody to put in a recognizer it’s been amazing to see dozens of companies come along and advance the state of the art in handwriting recognition. It’s still not to the point where this is a keyboard substitute nor is it likely to be for a number of years. But it’s very adequate in terms of the kind of note-taking or forms fill out that you would do on a mobile basis. We’ll see over thirty different hardware manufacturers bring out machines designed for pen computing during 1992. In this very competitive environment, the pace with which hardware advances are brought into the marketplace is amazing even to the people most directly involved.

The debate in pen computing is somewhat about whether the first users of these machines will be individuals working with productivity tools much the same way they do on the desktop or whether it will be top down designs within organizations where they decide to equip their truck drivers or blue collar workers with these machines who didn’t have them in the first place. Both of these will be important.

My personal view is that with the very large screen device which will cost in excess of $3000 for the next two to three years it’ll largely be horizontal users—people who had a desktop computer and want now to move out and have more access to the same kind of information and perhaps the even same user interface that they’ve used previously.

Now I’ve used pen as an example of how the PC platform is changing. It’s only the most visible of all the changes. The PC is now changing to have sound capability built in….

Posted by Loren at June 16, 2004 11:32 AM