Wisdom of the crowd | Which key technology should you adopt over the next five years?
For a company, picking the wrong trends to follow can make life difficult or lead to disaster. If, at the start of this decade, you invested in strategies based on using fax machines or standalone videophones, DAT, WAP or DAB, "push technologies" or paperless offices, then you might not have done as well as if you'd chosen blogging, social networking, or a user-generated content strategy. You've been invited to a meeting to decide what will be the most important technology for your company in the next five-10 years. What do you pick, and why? • Mobile and location-based services are the only one I'd put money on. dvdhldn • Looks like a game of BS bingo to me. Current buzzwords du jour in my place are "SaaS", "virtualisation" and anything that's in the "cloud". If you can virtualise a service by placing it on the internet (and thus, in the cloud), you get a triple-word score. BarryMcC • I'm putting my money on the Sinclair C5 making a comeback. tigerdraught • I feel there is a massive future in the games industry, with the next step being real-time 3D rendering with the current-gen console (probably not now, but definitely in the next set of consoles in about three-four years) YoungPayters • The one I'd really put my money behind would be cloud computing. There's a lot of small IT companies out there running their own servers and wasting a lot of money doing so. I'd be surprised if, 10 years from now, any of these companies still own their own server hardware. I suspect e-book readers will eventually take off, but they need to seriously come down in price – under $100 would probably be the breakthrough point. Barry841 • Domestic solar power has to be in there
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Wisdom of the crowd | Which key technology should you adopt over the next five years?
Technophile | Chumby widget gadget
The Chumby does nothing you couldn't with an iPod touch – yet, it has a peculiar, clever charm Once upon the dotcom boom, 3Com announced a product called Audrey. Audrey was to be an internet device that would sit in your kitchen, and which you would use to do little online tasks. It would cost about $499. It never arrived; and it's not even clear whether there are any Audreys still in existence. (Dreadful name, of course, didn't help.)Now, though, there's the Chumby. And the Chumby is everything the Audrey wanted to be, and much more. It's a small, mains-powered device, about the size of two of those juggling beanbags, and about as soft (or hard); it looks and feels throwable. It also has a little screen (3.5in, 320x240, which doesn't sound enough, but is plenty). And Wi-Fi. And an alarm clock function. And some USB sockets for connecting, occasionally, to a computer
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Technophile | Chumby widget gadget
Technology journalism is hard-wired to embrace change | Vic Keegan
From BBC computers to tweeting, via the dotcom boom, it's been an interesting 26 years When the Guardian's first Technology section came out in October 1983, it was in a different political environment. The first issue interviewed the then information minister Kenneth Baker as he played at home with his BBC B computer. He was part of Mrs Thatcher's government, which, surprisingly, had endorsed a BBC-designed computer for use in the nation's schools to help education – very successfully too.
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Technology journalism is hard-wired to embrace change | Vic Keegan
Guardian technology section 1983-2009, by the people who edited it
The section began in 1983 as a couple of pages in the main paper before branching out as its own section. Its editors remember how it evolved … Jack Schofield | Futures Micro Guardian | 1985-1994 The success of Futures Micro Guardian, for which I'd written a weekly column from the first issue in 1983, encouraged the Guardian to expand its IT coverage, but this wasn't just an editorial concern. The paper's commercial strategy was to try to dominate the graduate recruitment market, and in the 80s, IT was a growing business with plenty of job ads to chase. I joined the paper to launch Computer Guardian in September 1985, and we chased them. It had to appear on a Thursday because we aspired to make it something like the media, education and society sections that appeared on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. I didn't have any problem being commercial: I'd spent a decade editing bookstall magazines where you either made money or you didn't survive. But it was interesting to join a paper owned by a charitable trust. It was also like stepping back in time, because the Guardian didn't seem to have any computers. Like many computer journalists, I was already an online addict, and used BT's Telecom Gold service when editing Practical Computing, one of the early monthlies. I started publishing my email address in the Guardian and used that and Cix to receive copy electronically. This became even more useful when, post Wapping, our minicomputer-based Atex publishing system arrived. Before that, Computer Guardian pages were made up in Manchester, with stories being sent up a week before publication. Computer Guardian covered everything from talking teddy bears to supercomputers. Features on the opening broadsheet page were usually aimed more at the general reader, and we covered microcomputers from Acorn, Amstrad, Atari, Commodore and Sinclair. These were extremely popular at the time, mainly for playing games, so I added a column of games reviews. Features on the inside panels, next to the job ads, covered more professional and industry topics. Regulars included Keith Devlin's maths column, continued from Futures Micro Guardian, and the Workspace column written by a retired IT manager, the late Ralph Cornes. Over time, the two side's interests converged as IBM PC-compatible machines became affordable, and as both home and professional users adopted Microsoft Windows 3 after its launch in 1990. Indeed, in the use of online systems such as Fidonet bulletin boards, Prestel, CompuServe and Cix, some home users were ahead. Many readers were on Demon, which started via a Cix conference, before big companies woke up to the net.
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Guardian technology section 1983-2009, by the people who edited it
How to buy a computer in 1983 | From the archive
From Jack Schofield's first column for the Guardian's computer section in 1983, here is his guide to buying a home computer Alas the latest isn't the greatest It might be cheap but sometimes it's nasty. Jack Schofield offers a guide to the first-time buyer
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How to buy a computer in 1983 | From the archive
iFixit opens up repository of repair manuals
You might have heard of iFixit before: they're the chaps that take great delight in doing teardowns of new gadgets - ripping apart, say, a brand new iMac to show you the constituent parts. That's all well and good, but if you're not actually familiar with what iFixit does the rest of the time then perhaps it's a good time to get acquainted. The site itself offers DIY repair manuals for all sorts of Apple products - pretty useful for those of us who have locked ourselves into Steve Jobs's walled garden. Instead of dragging that busted iPod or unhappy Mac to the Apple store to watch one of the so-called "geniuses" stare at it for a bit, you can get a screwdriver and fix it yourself. Now, this might not exactly chime with the general trend to consumer electronics as something people don't understand - and remember, we wrote about the death of the manual back in August - but it's liberating to do it yourself. Given how little time most of us spend actually fishing about inside our computers these days, there's a satisfaction in trying to push towards a more hands-on culture full of people who aren't afraid to take a crack themselves (anyone who is de facto IT support for their friends and family knows how useful it would be if everybody felt like they could fix their own computers). Anyway, the really interesting thing about iFixit is that the company has just announced that it's releasing its manuals under Creative Commons licenses - which means that they'll continue to be free forever, and that you are free to reuse, adapt and build on what's already there. Today, we are giving all that content to the world. Effective immediately, we are licensing all iFixit repair manuals under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license. To my knowledge, this is the largest free release of repair documentation ever. We are committing to make our repair manuals available to everyone in the world, forever, for free. Good on them.