What do you think computers will be like in 2022

[liamnixon]

2022. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 2022. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

Skynet fights back.

2021 -- Google is renamed "Skynet."

[t0p]

The revolution in mobile computing will continue. There'll be wearable computers - visual display through a device worn on the face like glasses, which will also feed audio to the ear. Some kind of mini-tablet, a quarter the size of an iPhone, which will provide pointer control. No need for a keyboard/keypad as the device will have advanced voice recognition. This will provide telephony/internet/multimedia/whatever else you want while out and about.

The home machine will provide access to integrated internet/TV/home entertainment/facilities for home workers. Most machine time will be taken up serving games and porn. Pornographic games, probably.

Corporate computing will be dominated by machines with quantum processors and advanced AI. These "smart" computers will spend most of their time trying to predict financial and social trends... and getting it wrong of course!

[lukjad]

I'm thinking... pretty much like now, only way more powerful. Probably we'll have small, fairly powerful computers to take with us where we go, and larger, more powerful ones at home. We'll look back on today and not be able to BELIEVE how we once measured RAM in megabytes.

[jonathonblake]

Everyone I knew had no internet access or only dial-up. There was practically no spam or pop-ups.

In 1996 I was experimenting with challenge-response filters for my email, because the spam was so bad.

I mean in 1996, I wouldn't have imagined iPods, iPhones, Ubuntu, Google Docs, Compiz, netbooks...

iPod is/was nothing more than the Walkman converted to a computer. No bigger than the transition of the transistor radio to the Walkman.

iPhones are nothing more than the marriage of the cell phone with the computer. IOW, expected even though not specifically predicted.

There were at least a dozen commercial companies, and half a dozen non-commercial companies battling it out for Linux distro domination.

MSO as a web service was available from a third party vendor for corporations.

Compiz is merely part of the evolution of window managers. Once non-gamers saw what gamers expected their games to do, non-gamers wanted their desktop to have the same effects. Look at what the cutting edge games 5that require the latest and most expensive graphcis cards from nVidia and its competitors are doing, and you'll be seeing what the unadorned, stripped won, with no effects windows managers will be doing in 2022.

The concept of the netbook has been around since the seventies. The issue has always been to get it down to an affordable level.

jonathon

[HermanAB]

In 2022?
90% of computers will run Windows 8 and boot in about 3 minutes, despite having 64 Terabytes of RAM and a 2.2 Petahurtz, 1024 core X128 processor.

[lisati]

Informal prediction: due to the cataclysmic results of bad decision-making by world leaders and sloppy educational standards, much of the technological "know-how" available the early 21st century will be lost, resulting in people having to revert to systems based on 4-bit CPUs.

[Bodsda]

The UN will successfully seize control of the Internet, filtering content, limiting bandwidth and throttling http downloads. The resistance will be linux experts working undercover in the US government in an attempt to seize control of the supercomputers to break the 8388608 bit encryption to regain control of the Internet.

This attempt will fail, and as the 'experts' begin to grow old they decide to develop technologies to keep their brain alive thus keeping the knowledge. And here, the cyber-hackers are born. However due to a nuclear explosion when the American government wanted to see what happened when they fired an intergalactic nuclear weapon at the sun their was no solar power to keep the cyber-hackers 'online' so they decided to farm humans for energy and thus, the matrix was born

[Sylslay]

One TB erverywere and windows too

[ghindo]

Fast.

[jonathonblake]

*I think there will be three main classes of computers: netbooks/nettops, servers, and workstations (which mostly only hobbyists like me will own.)

Four classes: You forgot the Beowulf cluster. (Or do you consider that to be a special case of workstation/server?)

*Many people will use a game console as their main computer, and netbooks as secondary machines.

I think the TV is more likely to be the main computer, than a gaming machine.

That said, netbooks will outsell both types.
* PHBs will have discovered that netbooks are cheaper than laptops, and that if lost, they don't have to be concerned about losing*data;
* Schools will have discovered that netbooks are cheaper to provide than paper textbooks. Colleges will use netbooks, simply because students will have been conditioned into accepting US$1000 per semester for content that they can use for 120 days. (I'm assuming that digital copies will cost the same as the hard copy.)

The performance of the netbook of 2012 will be on a par with, or better than todays laptop. However, it won't have the disk drives. A BluRay drive, and the USB replacement will be present. The OS will be on the BlueRay disk. Performance is between one and ten terraflop.

The workstation will have roughly 1 TB RAM, and a 1 petabyte hard drive.
Corporate servers will have roughly 8 TB RAM, and up to 1 zettabytes of storage. Performance is between one and ten petaflops.

Beowulf clusters will be capable of one zettaflops.

Voice input will be standard for netbooks, and workstations. Albeit available, servers will usually require either a keyboard, or mice input.

Those on the bleeding edge will control their workstation, or netbook by thought alone.

Output choices will be speech, or graphics display.

Whilst voices still sound "robotic", then will contain far more inflection. and other accent patterns, than current voices have. (To rephrase: The speech output can be configured to sound like a person one "knows". Your desktop theme will include the pronunciations of your favorite celebrity, or anybody else you choose.)

Hardcopy output will be to either 2D or 3D printers.

Software:

This is the biggie. Other than software providing better i18n and a11y integration, I don't see much in the way of increased functionality.

At a fundamental level, there is very little difference between the software that ran on a 386-DX 40, and the software that runs on an AMD 64 bit quad core, or PlayStation 3. Probably the biggest difference is the abandonment of the concept of "one tool for one job".

Is there a "killer app" out there, waiting to be discovered? I doubt it. Visicalc was probably the last such actual critter. Nearly everything since then has been feature creep, and recessive. (Why did it take a secretary in 1950 an hour to produce a press release that today takes ten people three days to produce?)

jonathon