INTRODUCTION - Structured Computer Organization - page 27

showed that computers did not need to sit on a desk or in a server room, but in-
stead, could be put into an easy-to-carry package with touchscreens and handwrit-
ing recognition to make them even more valuable.
The Apple Newton, released in 1993, showed that a computer could be built in
a package no bigger than a portable audiocassette player. Like the GridPad, the
Newton used handwriting for user input, which in this case proved to be a big
stumbling block to its success. However, later machines of this class, now called
PDAs ( Personal Digital Assistants ), have improved user interfaces and are very
popular. They have now evolved into smartphones .
Eventually, the writing interface of the PDA was perfected by Jeff Hawkins,
who had created a company called Palm to develop a low-cost PDA for the mass
consumer market. Hawkins was an electrical engineer by training, but he had a
keen interest in neuroscience, which is the study of the human brain. He realized
that handwriting recognition could be made more reliable by training users to write
in a manner that was more easily readable by computers, an input technique he
called ''Graffiti.'' It required a small amount of training for the user, but in the end
it led to faster and more reliable writing, and the first Palm PDA, called the Palm
Pilot, was a huge success. Graffiti is one of the great successes in computing,
demonstrating the power of the human mind to take advantage of the power of the
human mind.
Users of PDAs swore by the devices, religiously using them to manage their
schedules and contacts. When cell phones started gaining popularity in the early
1990s, IBM jumped at the opportunity to integrate the cell phone with the PDA,
creating the ''smartphone.'' The first smartphone, called Simon , used a touch-
screen for input, and it gave the user all of the capabilities of a PDA plus tele-
phone, games, and email. Shrinking component sizes and cost eventually led to the
wide use of smartphones, embodied in the popular Apple iPhone and Google
Android platforms.
But even the PDAs and smartphones are not really revolutionary. Even more
important are the ''invisible'' computers, which are embedded into appliances,
watches, bank cards, and numerous other devices (Bechini et al., 2004). These
processors allow increased functionality and lower cost in a wide variety of appli-
cations. Whether these chips form a true generation is debatable (they have been
around since the 1970s), but they are revolutionizing how thousands of appliances
and other devices work. They are already starting to have a major impact on the
world and their influence will increase rapidly in the coming years. One unusual
aspects of these embedded computers is that the hardware and software are often
codesigned (Henkel et al., 2003). We will come back to them later in this topic.
If we see the first generation as vacuum-tube machines (e.g. ENIAC), the sec-
ond generation as transistor machines (e.g., the IBM 7094), the third generation as
early integrated-circuit machines (e.g., the IBM 360), and the fourth generation as
personal computers (e.g., the Intel CPUs), the real fifth generation is more a
paradigm shift than a specific new architecture. In the future, computers will be