Yes. My point was that what we've seen is a joke or something similar, it's not real.
Yep. There's many ways currently possible of achieving the same end - depending, I guess, on how you define that 'end'.
If we define it as simply contacting your computer and inputting to it and getting stuff back from it with a tiny device you can carry around then we've currently got it with our mobile phones and internet connectivity, emailing and such.
But that 'simple' definition is very vague really in terms of quality of 'input' and 'output' and quality of input and output is nearly 100% of what matters in communications including computering.
I mean such things as an easy to operate keyboard instead of micro sized cellphone keys. I mean access to programs on your computer that will do many things for you easily, rather than simple access to email. I mean receiving output from those programs instead of simply receiving web pages and emails. And so on.... it's everywhere. When you input a photograph you prefer and there's a million dollar industry dedicated to providing it for you - high fidelity megapixel input. Same for sound. Same for spreadsheet input - a simple archaic spreadsheet looks clumsy and stupid against today's spreadsheets which offer 'high quality' input and output.
So its a question of quality and the cellphone is clumsy, tiny, limited.
But it does the basic job. It connects. That's 99% of the task, that connection.
That connection frees us from the clumsy, heavy, tied-down hardware that does all the computing for us.
Now we just need this question of 'quality' for input and output.
For input I'd say a mixture of voice and scanning will be the way to go.
Train your computer, the world's computers, to recognise voice commands and we can run them from the tiniest microphone anywhere in the world.
And, of course, if you can access your computer you can access all the computers in the world wide web
This is current technology. There's no problem training a computer to recognise your voice. What's missing is the operating system or the programs to enable voice commands to be spoken into the computer.
Currently you speak to your computer and it will make a text file of what you've said, for word processing.
A little more than that but not much.
But when you can sit on the top of Mt Everest and speak into your cellphone, watching the screen for display, with a zoom in facility, and say things like this, we'll be getting there....
computer.
open spreadsheets.
find march
find bigcompany assets
show totals
format totals for printing
print to file "bigcompanyassets"
open email
compose to chief@bigcompany
say "here's your spreadsheet, Jim"
attach file bigcompanyassets
send
inbox
read 1
delete
exit
open wordprocessor
new document
say "here's a test of this function"
insert graphic
down
down
select
say "that's our cabin in montana"
save as
exit
close computer
call search and rescue.....
see what I mean? That's all possible right now, with your cellphone and a little voice comms programming and software...