ACTiViTY 2...

" COMPUTERS 20 YEARS FROM NOW"

I think that this is an interesting take on the future of comupters, but this industry is a fickle and unpredictable one. You know that little quip about "never needing more than 640K of RAM" - that wasn't quite so true, now was it? Having said that the industry is unpredictable, you can't really fit its progression to a linear curve as you have - I'm sure that the industry would deviate from the line all over the place.

My prediction: in the next twenty years, society will push for greater integration between computers and their users - us. An intersting project codenamed "Digital Angel" sprang up about six years ago, with the intent of implanting people with GPS tracking microchips. I don't know what happened to this project, but to me, its some kind of precursor to the future of society. 
Actually, I am more amazed at how little the actual "user experience" has changed in the past twenty or more years. Let's face it, we're all using fancy-ass, super-fast Xerox PARCs with vintage 1970s technology: Keyboards, mice and windowing-OS's are almost thirty years old. If you go back thirty years before that, computers took up entire buildings and were programmed by hard-wiring!

When I was a kid I figured by now, I'd be having philosophical discussions with my own HAL 9000, not still banging on a QWERTY keyboard designed to keep speedtypists from jamming the keys on manual typewriters in 1868!!! Where are the universal speech inputs? Where are the eye-focal pointers? Where are the neural interfaces? Hello?

Even the speed itself of the "user experience" hasn't changed much since my Mac Plus. Even though my CPU is a few zillion times faster than a 68000, Word still takes half a minute to repaginate my manuscript... but it does it in 32 bit color... which is such a help when I'm writing a report... DUH! And my Mac Plus booted up in a few seconds... try that now with XP. So today I can Gigaflip and Gigaflop. Big frakkin' deal.

I'm massively unimpressed by today's computing experience. The vested interests embodied in Satan Gates and his Satyr Henchman Jobs have effectively frozen the computer "user experience" to about 1980 when they first got into the business. They have done more to hold us back than anything else by distracting us with the mad "performance" game which looks great on charts but doesn't mean tiddly-squat to the average computer user.