Aris Silzard

But, What About 50 Years From Now?… Imagine with me, for a few moments at least, that you are still young and will soon celebrate your tenth birthday. In this imaginary scenario, for the last several years, you have been living in a small town in Kansas — maybe a bit like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. The time is in the early fifth decade of the last century. With the strong encouragement of your parents, you have been taking piano lessons for a few years and are showing some modest talent for this activity. Recently your mother has begun to have visions of you someday performing as a concert pianist. In order to capture your promising musical accomplishments, your parents have made an appointment with the local studio, which also happens to be the one and only local radio station, for a recording session. You observe the grand piano sitting in the middle of an otherwise bare room, with ominous-looking egg-crate-like sound-absorbing material covering all the walls and ceiling. This recording studio is enough to intimidate most adults, let alone the typical ten-year old. A few practice runs through your prepared ten-minute program produces some decent passages but also plenty of wrong notes. The recording engineer informs you that the performance should be as mistake-free as possible because there will be only one opportunity to do the recording. You think to yourself, “that’s easy for you to say,” as your stress level and stage fright climb to new highs. All the while your mother is giving you words of encouragement but also contributing to the growing intensity of the experience by trying to reassure you how well you are going to do. “Sure Mom, but just what makes you think that?” are more words left unspoken. Finally, you can’t stall any longer, and the recording engineer tells you to prepare for his cue. He walks over to a piece of equipment that looks like an overgrown and very sturdy phonograph and places a new shiny black platter on it. The machine begins to spin the platter, an arm descends, the cue is given, and you begin to play. Meanwhile, the black platter continues its spinning and the “needle” generates a growing blob of a black string-like substance as the piano music is translated into tiny wiggly patterns in the spiral groove being cut into the black plastic. With great concentration, you make it through your program with only one small bobble. Your mother smiles and gives you a big hug. You have just participated in the marvel of creating your very own 78 rpm recording. And yes, some 40 plus years later, I still have that recording and when properly encouraged will get it out for you and play it. That moment of my life has been captured and can be expected to be “archival” for many years yet to come. While, in this nostalgic frame of mind, I took a look at our family’s photo album, which by now contains photos representing all the decades the 20th century. The earliest photos were from a time when my parents were younger than I was during my traumatic piano recording experience. These early photos were of course monochromatic, but the images continue to be as perfect today as the day they were created. The large-format negatives that, like the photos, have survived wars, refugee trains, ocean journeys, and the harshest of storage conditions, also show no noticeable degradation. Over the years, I have printed duplicates from them with perfect results. As I scanned through these earlier decades of family history, I thought about all the events and challenges. These images were indeed powerful memory joggers. I was glad that my parents had taken the effort to carry these images with them through so many years. I found my own initial photo-appearance in this album in the eventful fourth decade of the century. Most of these early photos were also monochromatic. The first color photos appear in the 50s. And how unfortunate that is. The images have almost disappeared and what little remains is an ugly orange color. The introduction of color was highly touted as the next generation of photography, and was heavily promoted through advertising as the way to capture precious memories. However, the color film and paper makers didn’t bother to let people know that their “memories” were only good for maybe a ten-year period before the images would virtually disappear. Those folks that stuck with the older Kodachrome slide-film process ended up with the longest-lasting results. But even today, none of the color imaging materials equals the archival qualities of monochrome films and papers. During the last two decades, there has been somewhat more attention devoted to the archival capabilities of color films and print materials. Cibachrome papers were the first, to my knowledge, to produce archival images that could be expected to last more than 50 years under normal storage and display conditions. Some of the Fuji films and papers have also recently demonstrated good archival qualities. With care one can expect images made with these films and papers to degrade less than 10 percent over periods of about five decades. Thus, it may just be possible to show the images you made of your year-2000 New Year’s eve celebration party at the one you will attend 100 years from now. However, suppose you used a digital camera? What will you have to show and how will you show it? How about in a shorter time — say 50 years from now? We were recently visiting with our new son-in-law, who does web-site design for a living and is thoroughly steeped in the latest computer technology. He was showing us the pictures they had taken during their honeymoon. While the photos had been taken with conventional 35-mm film, each roll had been put onto a CD for convenient computer viewing. His off-hand comment was, “I wanted to get them put onto a CD so I never

The Bumpy Road to Success – or – Avoiding the Potholes of Failure… It took LCD technology roughly forty years to overtake CRTs for television applications. It took Plasma Display technology nearly as long. Now, the latest exciting display technology vying for a place in the television and computer display marketplace is OLED. But it too has now been in development for roughly twenty years. Along the way there have been many other attempts to develop new display technologies that either failed entirely or found more limited product applications. For example, the Texas Instruments DLP technology has done well as the light engine in conference room projectors. LEDs had, until recently, found only a modest market for large stadium displays and for a few electronic billboards. Other technologies such as inorganic EL and the various attempts at Field Emission Technologies have not yet become major commercial successes in spite of many years of serious effort. For a display technology to succeed much has to go right and sometimes even a seemingly trivial problem can lead to failure. For example, inorganic EL displays were having reasonable success as specialty products for instrumentation applications, but as the desire for full-color in displays became more important, the lack of a good blue phosphor limited the viability of this technology. Even the mainstream LC technology has had an amazingly challenging road to travel. By all reasonable engineering standards this technology has no right to be in the leading position it now holds. The list of potential challenges and problems-to-solve appears dauntingly long: To begin, the dielectric constant variation that results from LC molecule orientation is quite small.This small effect can vary with the thickness of the LC layer.The LC materials are temperature sensitive even in normal ambient environments.The small variations in dielectric constant are direction dependent resulting in inherently limited viewing angles.The LC molecular orientation is dependent on surface conditions and stable viewing and good contrast depend on the continued application of a holding voltage.LC displays have low light transmission efficiency because of the need to use polarized light and color filters. And this is only an abbreviated list! Nevertheless, this technology had its modest successful beginnings in watches and portable calculators. LCDs provided the needed low power operation that other display technologies at that time could not. From there the technology was able to move into more demanding instrumentation, industrial, and avionics display applications. However, the major applications breakthrough came with the advent of the laptop computer. There was no other display technology that could operate with sufficiently low power consumption to allow for adequate battery life. So even though the first laptop computers had LC displays with monochrome screens, poor contrast, slow response, and limited resolution, they allowed this new category of products to be brought to market. It was a mainstream application that allowed an extensive technology infrastructure to develop. There is an important fundamental concept that is illustrated by this specific example. For a new technology to succeed it must have the opportunity to enter the market by solving a critical problem and it must allow for the technology to have a period of less-than-perfect performance so that further development can take place. The amazing end result for LC technology has been that all of the daunting technical challenges have yielded to a solution. The numerous potholes of failure were all successfully avoided. This is indeed a rare outcome. The LC displays that are currently available for laptop and television applications are basically “good enough” for all but the most unusual of circumstances. They have excellent resolution, adequate brightness, good contrast under a variety of ambient conditions, wide angle of view, and adequate response speed to display full-motion video. What else could we possibly want? Sunlight readability is perhaps not as good as it could be. Color gamut will continue to improve with the introduction of LED backlights. But, by and large, we have a display technology that is performing to our expectations and can be considered to be an excellent replacement for CRT technology. Plasma display technology is today in a similar position of being quite “good enough” for television applications. It did not have the benefit of having a new product category such as laptop computers to aid in its development, but it did get some early help with the neon-orange monochrome display terminals for banking institutions. Another example of a display technology that has been many years in the making is “electronic paper” from E-Ink. The early excitement and promises of how this technology would replace printed paper have not yet become reality. However, after many years of serious effort there are the beginnings of commercial success with the E-books that are now coming into wider use. How successful this technology will eventually become is still hard to say. But at least there is a reasonable expectation that future commercial viability is possible. From these examples, we can see that the path from the early demonstrations of a working technology to eventual success is typically a lengthy and seemingly torturous one. Even technologies of more limited scope such as the Texas Instruments DLP have taken many years of dedicated effort before achieving commercial success. And, unfortunately, it can take only one small but significant flaw for a new technology to be cast aside – that tiny but fatal flaw. In LCDs, it took many years to develop the active matrix technology with a transistor at each pixel along with a storage capacitor to hold the image for the entire frame. In the early days of laptop computers, this active matrix technology was not yet available and those displays were of limited resolution and poor contrast. The fortunate outcome for LC technology was that these transistors only have to switch voltages in the 5-volt range and at relatively slow speeds. This makes it possible to fabricate the large transistor arrays from amorphous silicon using relatively modest photolithography processes. For Plasma Displays, on the other hand, we had

The Upscale Rental Car… I didn’t ask for it.  But when offered, how could I say no?  The car I was assigned was a premium model and had every feature that one could imagine – and several that I thought would never be found in an automobile.  The day of the electronic vehicle has apparently arrived – at least in seriously upscale cars.  Contrary to past practice, the dashboard in this vehicle is now all-electronic.  There are no more mechanical gauges that one can admire while the car is sitting in the showroom.  This feature, that at one time was considered important for impressing buyers with the precision and quality of the shiny new vehicle they were contemplating, is apparently no longer needed.   This all-electronic dashboard is supplemented by another large display in the center console.  Over the last few years, this center console display has become a virtually standard feature in even less prestigious vehicles.   However, the really unusual and unexpected feature of this rental car was the “heads-up” display that projected the speed, compass direction, and several icons that appeared as little green automobiles.  After many years of futuristic predictions of how heads-up displays would one day be implemented in cars, it seems that the future has arrived.  So is it the future of the display enthusiasts’ dreams?  On this vehicle, the display of the speed and compass direction appeared to float in space – 3D like –about five to six feet beyond the windshield and about 10 degrees below the horizon.  The display is easy to read and the numbers and symbols are crisp.   However, after driving the car for three days, I have to admit that I did not find it helpful.  In fact, I ended up wishing that I could turn it off – an option that may possibly be found in the user manual.  Why did I not like it?  How could I not be enamored with this long predicted feature?  What I found was that having these numbers and symbols floating in space just above the hood-line was surprisingly distracting – especially at night.  The real environment beyond this display has a view of the road surface or the backend of other cars some distance away.  So having an object intruding into this space at a distance position where no real object should be was something not readily accepted by my eye-brain visual processing system.  Was it a serious problem?  No.  But, was this a useful and/or helpful feature?  I would also say have to say, no.  It was just as easy to see the digital speedometer in the all-electronic instrument cluster as it was to see these same numbers floating in space.  The addition of compass direction was also of little value.  When driving we don’t change directions all that frequently and when we do it’s just as easy to glance at the dashboard or the center console while we are trying not to get lost.  The really puzzling aspect of this display was the appearance of various small green icons that appeared to be in the shape of cars.  I’m sure if I could have read the user manual I would get some hint of what they are intended to tell the driver.  However, as the driver of a rental vehicle, I was not able to tell why they came and went in what appeared to be almost random fashion.  As best I could tell, they were trying to let me know that other cars were close by — in either the opposite lane or the adjacent lane.  Well, duh!  If I don’t already know that as the driver, then perhaps I shouldn’t be in the driver’s seat.  These icons were also somehow coupled to vibrators in the sides of the driver’s seat bottom cushion.  So little icons would come and go along with little buzzes from the side edges of the driver seat – an all-together peculiar, unhelpful, and distracting experience.  The center console’s display home-screen has at least a dozen choices of various climate control, navigation, entertainment, and communication features.  Without extensive practice and experimentation, trying to access these while driving would create about the same dangerous situation as texting while driving.  What was especially frustrating was that simple control functions such as changing the fan speed of the air-conditioner would sometimes cause a totally unintended result such as the center console opening to allow for inserting a CD.  In the three days that I drove this car, I was not able to figure out what action on my part caused this unintended result.  Since the temperature and fan speed controls were on this panel, it made it impossible to adjust either until the panel could be pushed back into place.  Have we reached the point where more is not necessarily better?  What was wrong with the older climate controls that did not require multi-level menus for access?  Being able to simply turn the temperature to warmer or cooler was really quite convenient.  But then that would not allow for the addition of all these other wonderful entertainment, navigation, and communication features that are now being offered.  We have simply run out of room to add more conventional control functions.  Not only that, the electronic modules are more economical than “real” controls.  So welcome to the 21st century of menu-driven features, more capabilities than we can use or appreciate, and unintended consequences when we try to use these features. Should you wish to share your own experiences with me, you may contact me directly from this site, by e-mail at silzars@attglobal.net, or by telephone at 425-898-9117.

Going Shopping… Sometimes even those of us who do not watch TV very much begin to think about having a newer one. The 27″ set that has served us well for the last twelve or so years is beginning to feel like it could use some younger companionship. A larger screen might be a nice added benefit. Thus, with a bit of encouragement from my spouse, one night we ended up at a Seattle video/audio store that has the reputation of having the “latest and greatest” at competitive prices. I was especially interested in what we would find in the way of new displays — large flat-faced CRTs, plasma panels, projection systems, and maybe even a surprise or two. The expected ones were all there. Several plasma screens were prominently displayed, one priced at $10,000 and another at $25,000 — including surround sound speakers! Wow… Certainly beyond my budget! Once past these clearly non-consumer products, most of the large-screen showroom was occupied by rear-projection systems using conventional CRTs. The prices were in the more comfortable range of $1,500 to $3,000. In the adjoining room, we found the direct-view televisions. The ones with the larger screens (32″ to 36″) appeared to be grouped into two categories, “conventional” and “digital.” This interesting terminology came to light as I listened to several salesmen interact with other shoppers. As I came to learn, “conventional” means regular old-fashioned NTSC television, and “digital” means everything that costs more than that. Just from the way these words were spoken, there was the clear implication that “digital” is new and good and everything else is not worthy of serious consideration. The typical customer (mostly husband-wife combinations) vs. salesperson dialogue went something like this: “Can you tell us what the difference is between the large-screen sets on the left and the ones on the right that have the sharper picture?” “Well, of course, the ones on the left are conventional analog sets and the ones on the right are digital high-definition sets.” “Oh, I see. But why are there blank areas at the top and bottom of the picture on that set?” “Oh, that’s because that set is displaying the new wide-screen format.” “But that sure makes the picture seem smaller. By the way, could you show us a regular program on that set over there instead of the promo-material for Channel 5 that is playing now?” “Well, unfortunately, no. There are no high-definition programs being broadcast right now. If you come back tomorrow at 6:00 pm we can show you the news from Channel 4 and 5 broadcast in high-definition.” “Will there be more programs soon?” “Oh, yes, certainly.” “So you recommend that we get one of these sets now?” “Of course. You would be buying the latest digital technology.” “But why are the prices so much higher? The regular sets are all less than $1,000 while the digital ones are around $4,000.” “Well, folks, that’s the price of the newest technology.” In every customer-salesperson encounter I observed, the final result was, “OK, thanks, I think we’ll go home and think about this some more.” I could see the confusion and frustration on the customers’ faces as they left the store. For perhaps different reasons, my conclusion was the same. The conventional large-screen sets didn’t look all that good because the scan-lines were clearly evident. And the “digital” sets were just as clearly too expensive. Reviewing the specifications attached to each of these “digital” sets, I could see that the manufacturers had taken many and varied paths to higher definition. For example, it was clear that some of these expensive sets would still require a converter box to accept over-the-air HDTV broadcasts. As a potentially serious buyer, I too ended up frustrated because I was hoping to find something that made optimum use of today’s NTSC signal, could eventually be adequate for watching HDTV, but didn’t carry a $4,000 price tag. There just didn’t seem to be anything like that available. A few weeks later I was having a pleasant lunch-time discussion with Dave Eccles, VP of the Sony Engineering Center in San Diego and Seminar Chair for the SID 2001 Symposium. Among other topics, I recounted my television shopping experience and expressed my frustration that no one was making a TV set that would optimize the picture quality of existing broadcast sources such as NTSC at an affordable price, he interrupted me in mid-complaint with a simple, “Sony makes such a set.” “What?” “Sure we make a set that does exactly what you want, and I recently saw a local newspaper ad for it for $1995.” “Well, that’s still a little expensive but sure better than $4,000.” And after some more discussion, a look at a faxed spec sheet from Dave’s assistant Linda, and a return trip to the video store (where the set was being featured at the special price of $1849), I have to agree that this set accomplishes the objectives that I was seeking. Basically, it uses a sophisticated form of line-doubling that not only nearly eliminates the visible scan lines but also improves horizontal resolution. The results are impressive. For those of us in the display community, the current confusing standards that we call HDTV, the lack of enthusiasm among broadcasters and cable companies to use so much bandwidth and incur extra expense for an improvement that may not increase advertising revenue, and the resistance among consumers to pay such high prices to acquire this difficult-to-pin-down improvement is creating an unfortunate slow-down in the growth of the latest display technologies. Incompatibility with today’s broadcasts, ultimate picture quality that demands a too-high price, and a confusing array of choices — what more can we do to scare away buyers and make this transition difficult? However, I have a suggestion. While we wait for all this to eventually get sorted out, let’s optimize our displays and video products for DVD players, digital satellite broadcasts, the newer versions of digital cable carrying conventional NTSC-like signals,

Getting it Right… October 6, 2000 — It is already past 11:00 pm, and I am determined to respond to a few more e-mails before retiring for the evening. I must still pack my suitcase for an 8:00 am flight that will take me by way of New York to Moscow for the FLOWERS 2000 Display Conference. Suddenly, in the middle of an e-mail that must reach my Russian colleagues before my arrival, the house plunges into darkness, followed by a deep explosion-like sound somewhere off in the distance. I momentarily ponder if this is an unexpected but effective demonstration that the speed of electric current in wires exceeds the speed of sound in air. So much for my nearly-completed e-mail, and so much for the several others I had planned to answer. Using a flashlight and a propane camping lantern, I finish my packing, set the alarm for an hour earlier than I had planned and retire for the night. Perhaps the blown power transformer will be repaired sometime during the night and I will still be able to get my important correspondence completed in my last-chance time slot between 5:00 and 6:00 am. At 3:15 am, the smoke alarms let out a piercing screech, the lights flash a couple of times and then stay on. I utter a few choice words as I stumble around the house in my deep-sleep-interrupted state and turn everything off, especially the computer which is now most unhappy that it’s power was interrupted in the middle of an important thought. October 7, 2000. While waiting for my connecting flight in New York, I encounter the following futuristic description in an “EE Times” article by Bob Weber about biometrics technology: “When she walks in the house, she notices the TV is on and wants to know if the kids have been watching the tube all afternoon or have been actively working on their homework. After touching the remote sensor with her finger, the digital broadband set-top box displays the times the TV has been on and the channels that have been surfed. With another cue, the set-top box goes out and retrieves any e-mail messages that have come in and reminds her that her husband will be arriving that night on flight 336 and that the electric bill needs to be paid. When she approves the payment, the system asks for her finger print again so that it can cross-check the authorization, and the money is then transferred from her checking account to the utility company.” Sounds great doesn’t it? Another version of the electronic home — the long-standing technologists’ dream — recently receiving renewed attention through the highly publicized efforts of several major computer and software companies. For those of us in the display community, the “electronic home” should be a great opportunity. A display on every refrigerator door. Displays for environmental and ambiance control. Displays for interactive art works and wall decorations. Displays for ordering products and reminding us when existing inventory is about to be depleted. Everything displayed, controlled, and customized to match the wishes and habits of the inhabitants. Can we really expect this to be our future? Or are we fooling ourselves as we did in the 1950s and early 1960s when supersonic airplanes were going to be the next important transportation development and houses were going to be built using interlocking pre-fabricated plastic panels with integrated wiring and plumbing. Instead, airplane technology ended up being driven by concerns for safety, noise, and the cost of fuel, and house construction today is much the same as it was 100 years ago, with wood, bricks, and plaster having turned out to be less expensive and environmentally friendlier than most man-created materials. What could go wrong with the technologists’ dreams of the perfect electronic home? The first difficulty might just be that we are still some time away from computers that are sufficiently robust for us to entrust them with our important house functions. The automobile industry seems to be leading the way by developing and incorporating electronic control functions that are about as reliable and long-lasting as the mechanical components. However, the ten-year life of a car is at least an order of magnitude shorter than the typical life-span of a house. I’ve never even heard anyone mention an electronic circuit for a hundred-year application. The second, and perhaps less obvious, difficulty is the assumption that we humans are predictable in our behaviors and that the process of acquiring, keeping track of, and re-acquiring various items is a simple activity. Some years ago, I learned just how difficult all this can be when I managed a number of manufacturing facilities. It turns out that inventory control and work-in-process control are major challenges even under the most carefully managed and closely supervised conditions. How will it work in a home where habits and behaviors are much more variable, and, with children of various ages, basically uncontrollable? Let us consider the simple but often-quoted example of the computer-controlled refrigerator that automatically re-orders milk. This should be trivial, right? However, just this week we purchased a quart of milk instead of the typical half-gallon because we were about to leave for a short trip. Would I have remembered to tell my refrigerator? How? Last week the milk container had a leak and we had to throw it out. Apparently, our refrigerator didn’t tell us (or didn’t care) because I had quite a mess to clean up. Yesterday, I decided on the spur-of-the-moment that I wanted some chocolate milk. But my refrigerator didn’t know that. It forgot to ask me to specify if I wanted 1% or 2%, the carton size, regular or lactose-reduced, and when I would be home to accept delivery. One of the fundamentals of modern manufacturing is the accurate control of production materials. At each process step, operators are trained to enter the details of materials usage, process yield, and scrap disposition. In spite of such careful control, it

And the Children Shall Lead Us… Quite some time ago, in the twelfth year of my life, I had the thrill of accompanying my parents on their annual Christmas shopping trip to Wichita, Kansas. I distinctly remember that the distance was 211 miles and that it took just over four hours to get there. This particular year turned out to be an extra special one because my objective was to come home with a Lionel electric train. I had saved every penny for most of the previous two years for this occasion and had worn out several Lionel catalogs — studying each page over and over again. With the additional contribution my parents had agreed to make as that year’s present, I would have just enough to get the modest set I had selected. The following morning, as we arrived at Innes’ department store, I could hardly contain my excitement and concern — what if they didn’t have the set I wanted? What if the price had changed and I didn’t have enough money to get it? The price in the catalog was $39.95, and that is exactly how much I had — and in 1952 dollars that was a considerable amount. Whew! The price was still the same and they had the set. And of all my childhood Christmases, this one stands out as the most memorable. Further additions, such as the log car with the magnetic dumping relay and an oil derrick with a lighted bubbler, were made on subsequent birthdays and Christmases. However, some major wishes remained unfulfilled. A schoolmate, whose father was one of the wealthier businessmen in the small town where we lived — he owned the local drugstore — had a much more elaborate layout. He had several locomotives, including a blue diesel-electric model, as well as four remotely operated switches on his layout. Oh, how I wanted to add extra track and switches to my layout. But the switches were too expensive for my modest budget, as was the additional locomotive. The best I could do was to buy some extra track to add a few new curves and hills to my layout. Nevertheless, this train was my most prized possession for the rest of my growing-up years. The locomotive and several of the cars are today, almost fifty years later, on display in my office. It still seems like a neat toy. Recently, I read an article in the ‘USA Today’ business section that the Lionel train company is enjoying a great revival and that once again kids and parents are buying electric trains. This success is allowing the company to add new features and to further refine its products. However, the prices are a bit higher (in today’s dollars) than when I went on my shopping trip to Wichita, with some of the upper-end locomotives now selling for well over $1,000. This newspaper article went on to suggest that perhaps parents as well as kids are searching for something more than video games and computer screens for entertainment. The “real feel” of a toy train and the mechanical precision that it represents are meeting some fundamental need for us to connect with the world around us. Whether this is true or not, I do believe that toys represent a “leading indicator” of what is in store for us in the future. Looking back, perhaps we can say that in the 1950s toy electric trains were symbolic of our growing fascination with mechanical devices of all kinds — cars, airplanes, and appliances. In the 1980s video games presaged the arrival of the home computer and all the other microprocessor-inspired devices that followed. Today, we are in the midst of another major toy revolution, with robotics, voice recognition, and interactivity. We are approaching the age of intelligent machines through the creative application of technology to products currently intended only for play and entertainment. And what better platform could we have for such experimentation? After all, a toy does not have to do anything “practical.” Whatever it does is fine as long as it can sustain some reasonable level of interest and amusement. The criteria for what is “good enough” can be quite arbitrary compared to devices that must fill specified operating needs for business or home applications. Through toys we can begin to glimpse the interests of future generations. After all, children are less set in their ways and are continually exploring and testing their boundaries and their environments anyway. For example, the strong market response to robotic animals as “pets” may be an indicator of the future acceptance of ever-more capable robotic products with computer-generated personalities. It is also a positive indicator that voice interaction with our computers will become comfortable for most of us in the next decade. As a result of the ongoing doubling of compute power approximately every two years, we are fast approaching the time when computers will be limited by the insufficient speed of our fingers to “tell” the machines what we want them to do. We will likewise not be able to absorb the results of these computations with our single-page-at-a-time displays. The limitations of sensors and keyboards on the input side, and displays, printers, and robotic mechanisms on the output side will become serious obstacles to information processing and the implementation of artificial intelligence. Will it take our children to tell us how to solve these problems? Time and again I read about the coming “age of intelligent machines” and how computers will soon be able to out-think us. With what inputs and outputs? How will they help us if they can’t interact with the “real” world? For this reason, I think it is great that mechanical toys are once again becoming more popular and that toys combining compute power and mechanical functions are coming on the scene. We need these toys to help us understand how to apply computer power and we need them to train our new generation in the importance of

Wishful Thinking… Is there a point at which one can properly assert that unbridled optimism has crossed over into wishful thinking — or maybe even a denial of reality? I am beginning to feel that way about some of the next-step opportunities being proposed for the Internet and personal computers as control centers for our homes and for our lives. Here are the disconnects I am trying to reconcile. Wishful Thinking #1. The Internet will become the way we do more and more of our computer-related work activities. Our files will be stored remotely and we will access software from central sites as we need it for a small usage fee. Our computers will become more of communications appliances than today’s self-contained processing and data storage devices. The Reality. In the last month, I have had to deal with at least a dozen virus-laden messages. Some I could recognize immediately as of suspicious origin. Several looked dubious and I checked with the sender prior to opening them. Sure enough, in both of these cases, they were indeed carrying nasty viruses. Three other e-mails came from “trusted sources” and my virus-scan software caught the creepy-crawlies before they could get through. Two of the three senders did not know that their computers were infected. Unfortunately, one evening, tired from a long trip home, I was looking through my latest e-mails and tried to open an attachment that came from a known source but didn’t look quite right. Because of my travel schedule, I hadn’t updated my virus scan program for about a week. I will skip the nasty details of what happened next. Let me just say that it was almost one week and $360 later before my computer was clean and safe to use again. There are still a few remnants of broken and missing software that keep my computer from running exactly as it did before — like a car that has been repaired after a significant collision. A recently published survey by ICSA states that in the last 12 months 80% of the respondents had experienced viruses/Trojans/Worms. Is that acceptable for a ubiquitous product? Wishful Thinking #2. In the future we will see more shopping and financial transactions handled over the Internet. Banking and bill paying will all be on-line. The Reality. Our newspapers and television news almost daily report the latest attacks on commerce sites that end up with stolen credit card numbers, and on the recent rapid growth of a crime known as “identity theft.” Wishful Thinking #3. Soon the computer will become the central control point in our homes, helping us to control heating, lighting, appliances, entertainment functions, and security. We will all have keyless entry with biometric recognition. The computer will be the reliable device that helps us in our daily activities such as ordering grocery items, reminding us to pick up the cleaning, and keeping track of where we need to be next. The Reality. In my home/office, we have two relatively new computers. We also have two older models that run on Windows 3.1 and DOS. The older ones get fewer hours of use, but can you guess which ones are the most reliable? The new machines, using the most popular software, can be counted on to hang up at least once per day. Why can my computer exit my Internet hook-up three times out of four successfully, but not the fourth time? I didn’t do anything different that fourth time, so why the red “X” of an illegal operation? That and other peculiarities such as slowly eroding disk space and suddenly lost printer drivers don’t exactly inspire confidence in these machines as reliable control points in my home or anywhere else in my life. Given these apparent disconnects between the hopes and aspirations of the computer, software, and Internet providers and the reality experienced by us users, what can we expect to see in the future? Will this discrepancy be resolved or are we doomed to a stress-filled life of one computer-created crisis after another? Unfortunately, there is not much that we in the display community can do directly to fix these problems. The products we provide have great reliability and seldom need attention. Both CRTs and LC-based displays are sturdy devices that survive even the rough handling of cross-country and cross-continent shipments without requiring re-calibration by the end customer. So what can be done to help with the software-created crises that are likely to get worse before they get better? Somehow we must encourage the movement toward robust software products that will perform the functions they promise each and every time. These products must be immune to unauthorized attempts to change them. I would find great comfort in an operating system or other software that could only be changed by physically having to read the changes from a CD-ROM. The comfort of such protection (knowing that at least my operating system and my software are immune to invasion) would more than make up for any inconvenience, or small extra expense, of not being able to download updates over the Internet. At least I should be offered that choice in the products I buy. Then, whenever I wish, I could just back up my data files. An astute attorney once told me that the only reason we have laws and written contracts is for when things go wrong. If we have an informal agreement and everything is going as we hoped, then there is no need for a written document. But when expectations diverge, then we need the protection of a written contract and sometimes even the courtroom. Have we engineers been so naive as to think that everyone would behave honorably when using computers and the Internet? If we can’t count on that in any other facet of our lives why would it be different with computers? It’s as if we have built our electronic houses with no locks on the doors. Anyone can just walk in and vandalize the

In the Year 2001 plus 25… Twenty-five years can seem like both a long time and a short time. In the last twenty-five years, some things have changed dramatically, yet others are much the same. Often, when we look back at history, the progress of events gives the appearance of the predetermined and obvious. I can still remember a time when I was a young student in school thinking how wonderful it must be that all great leaders seemed to know, from the day they were born, that they would become successful and influential people. It was my conclusion at the time that there could not possibly be any such persons among my classmates because none of us had such wonderful insight. It was not until many years later that I learned the future is much more uncertain than the past. If we look back to 25 years ago, and what the display community was like at that time, it takes a bit of effort to reconstruct a world with no desktop or laptop computers, no personal printers or copiers, no home fax machines, no CDs or VCRs, no cell phones, no e-mail, and no Internet. Thank goodness, at least we had color television, conventional telephones, mainframe computers with up to 64K of dynamic memory, and electric typewriters. CRTs were of course the dominant display technology. And even though mainframe computers typically used one or more display terminals, they were monochrome and small. LCDs were only available for watches and calculators, LEDs were just beginning to recover from being eliminated from the wristwatch business. Color displays were only used for television and there were numerous studies showing that color would never be needed for avionics, instrumentation, or computer data-terminal applications. Plasma panels were a beautiful orange color. EL displays were being explored. Yet, while so much has changed, the foundations for most of today’s display technologies already existed at the materials level. CRTs, LCs, plasma panels, EL, LEDs, and projection displays all had their beginnings more than 25 years ago. Even tip-array field- emission technology was already several years into its development. So should we be so bold as to look ahead 25 years and try to imagine the display world we may have? The world-wide display business is currently at about $40 billion dollars and growing at roughly 10 percent per year. The CRT segment is about one half of that and still growing at about 5 percent per year. This is balanced by the flat-panel segment which is growing at about 20 percent per year. If even the 10 percent overall growth rate is sustained for 25 years then the annual display revenues will be $500 billion dollars and maybe more. Is that possible? Is it likely? As compute power continues to double every 18 to 24 months and as communications bandwidth increases at a similar rate, the visual channel — displays — becomes ever more important as the link between the human brain and machine intelligence. For this reason, I believe that display technology will play an increasingly important role in the Information Age. What kind of world might we have in 2026 and what will its displays look like? Let’s consider a few possibilities. Perhaps the biggest change in our lives will be that normal speech interaction with machine intelligence will become common. We will be able to talk to our computers using standard vocabulary and common sentence structure. Most appliances will respond to spoken commands through home networks. Real-time language translation will be readily available from portable devices and, therefore, there will no longer be a language obstacle at technical conferences. (This will, naturally, lead to a dramatic increase in SID membership!) The current method of loading software into ubiquitous microprocessors will have been replaced by more robust methods such as hardware-based operating systems. New capabilities will be available through something that, for now, we will call “knowledge cubes.” The home server will be a similarly designed machine that can be easily reconfigured with user-friendly buttons, knobs, and interconnects. The server will be able to help the user through normal speech interaction. These robust, hardware-based systems will have made systems crashes and software viruses a thing of the past. Homes, automobiles, airplanes, and trains will appear much the same as they are today. The automobile may undergo the biggest change with hybrid propulsion systems combining fossil fuels and electricity, or fuel cells, becoming more common. There will be a larger electronic content in all of these conveyances but it is quite possible that the cars of 2026 will still have traditional electro-mechanical gauges for the basic dashboard functions. By 2026, the Internet will have about the same importance in our lives as the telephone did a decade ago. In fact, by then we may find that voice interaction with computers has had an even larger impact.Traditional stores will continue to thrive and personalized customer service will be even more important than today. Compute power and the Internet will aid and facilitate that customer service, but by then we will have learned that automated order entry cannot replace it. However, we can expect wide acceptance of convenience devices such as pen-sized bar code scanners that will be used by all of us to identify, retrieve, and expand on information about products and anything else of interest to us. We can also expect more specialized services such as clothing custom-made to fit each of our specific sizes and shapes. Computer intelligence and robotics will be implemented in varied and innovative ways. We can expect intelligent toys that have unique personalities and can interact with children to teach and entertain. We can expect our televisions and movies to be increasingly populated with computer-generated personas. These personas will be created to represent certain ideals that will go beyond what real people can ever hope to achieve. They may even be adjustable for each viewer at each viewer’s discretion. Does this mean that we will finally have figured out

The Four Minute Mile… Some years ago, after completing graduate school and settling into my professional career, I decided that I should add some physical activity to my otherwise sedentary lifestyle. The specific motivation was a week long camping trip to the Yosemite Valley and the realization that my hiking and climbing abilities were not nearly what I wanted them to be. Thus, I selected an exercise program that was intended to build my aerobic capabilities by gradually increasing the distance walked/jogged while reducing the time required to cover that distance — more commonly known as “getting in shape.” The stated goal was to be able to run a distance of one-and-a-half miles in under twelve minutes after three months of training. During the first week, I walked a mile each day in about twenty minutes. The second week, the times dropped to about sixteen minutes. The third week, I tried adding some jogging and the times dropped to about twelve minutes. The following week, I increased the distance to one-and-a-half miles and kept the pace about the same. Without too much pushing, I was able to achieve my interim eighteen-minute target. This was beginning to look like a really easy project. In no time at all, I should be meeting the twelve-minute objective. Getting from eighteen minutes to fifteen took a few more weeks and a little more effort, but I still felt that I was pretty much on track. But, after that, it got a lot harder. Over the next several months my enthusiasm wavered and with a few business trips to break the intended routine, my diligence evaporated. Suddenly, there were all kinds of good excuses for why I couldn’t find time to do the daily runs. It was not until more than a year later that I once again decided to try this activity on a sustained basis. However, this time I knew that whatever goals I set the results would not come easily. Fortunately, for this second effort, I also had the additional motivation of participating in a youth soccer league as a coach and referee. Over the next few years, not only did I gain the ability to run the mile-and-a-half in twelve minutes, but I was able to increase my conditioning to consistently run five miles at a pace of less than seven minutes per mile. Is there a four minute mile in my future? I think you and I both know the answer to that. However, what has been an unexpected result is that even now, after many years, I continue to be able to run eight to ten miles at a decent pace on a near-regular basis. If we were to graph my rate of improvement, from the first efforts of walking a mile in twenty minutes to my eventual capabilities, there would be a clear asymptote to this graph. In addition, there would be gaps of no progress and even steps backward. It seems to me that new technology developments and getting new products to market follow quite the same behavior. The early stages of concept demonstration are much easier than the subsequent challenges of creating cost-effective and profitable products that meet the unforgiving competitive demands of an international marketplace. Perhaps, the recently much-maligned dot.com businesses are an illustrative example of this. Following their model (and exaggerating only slightly), we would start an internet-based business and sell 27″ name-brand television sets for $50 each to “establish a customer base and capture market share.” Once we had this large customer base, we would then gradually raise prices to get to profitability. Of course, raising prices to $100, then to $150, and then to $200 would continue to prove that customers still flocked to our site. But to get to profitability, we would need to charge $300 or more. However, that is now the same price for which our customers can buy the set at any other dot.com site or traditional discount store. At that point, life for our dot.com company gets very challenging. While, it was relatively easy to raise prices and thereby to reduce our quarterly losses from several hundred million dollars to maybe just fifty million or so, from there to profitability is like becoming a four-minute mile runner. Only a few can hope to accomplish it. And the process is similarly asymptotic. The traditional stores — especially the discount warehouses — may even have some inherent advantages. The customer does the work of picking the items from the shelves, the shopping cart and the car trunk are the no-cost shipping containers, the drive home provides transportation of the goods for free, and returning or exchanging a misbehaving product is easy. If companies providing home milk delivery services several decades ago, couldn’t stay in business, why should a dot.com grocery store have any more success today? The story with new technology is similar. How many press releases have we seen of new display technologies that are going to “leap-frog” existing products? How many news reports have we read of great new and “revolutionary” displays based on a new type of light-emission or light-modulation capability — illustrated by a companion photo of a one-inch-square single-pixel display in a barely-visible green or orange color? And how many announcements have we read of the great progress being made that, when linearly extrapolated, will soon lead to commercial success? To get from these early demonstrations to profitable products is again not too different from achieving that ability to run the four-minute mile. Many would like to do it, but few actually succeed. I suppose that sometimes such high optimism is simply due to the exuberance (or lack of experience) of the participants, but just as often I suspect the drive behind such overly optimistic announcements is the need to meet investors’ expectations, or to try to live up to the early promises made to those investors. Is there any hope for those of us who most likely will not be able to

It Takes More Than One… Earlier today, as I was returning home on one of my running routes that requires a six-hundred-foot climb from downtown Issaquah back up to the top of the hill where we live, for the sake of variety and maybe hoping that a new way up the hill would make it seem less steep, I tried a new street. I don’t just mean that I tried a different route to get home. This street is really new, with still-black asphalt and pristine concrete sidewalks in attractive s-curves, winding from the new shopping center at the base of the hill up to the top, past apartments and condominiums still under construction — hundreds of them. As I looked at the new stores below me and the as-yet-unoccupied housing units sprouting on both sides of this winding street, it suddenly struck me that no matter how hard I worked — even for my entire lifetime — I would not be able to construct these stores and apartments solely with my own efforts. In fact, I would not be able to complete even the one large home-improvement store that now lay below me where only six months before had been a bare patch of newly-graded ground. What a depressing thought to realize how limited my capabilities really are! But then I began to strategize how I would go about getting such a project accomplished. Of course, to get it done I would need to order the materials that would have been made by others and have them delivered to me by people who specialize in such work. Then I would need to buy or hire equipment such a crane and tractors to help move all this construction material into place, and this equipment have been built by others as well. And even though I could learn to operate this equipment, it would be much more efficient to hire someone already experienced in doing that. Then I started thinking about the construction projects that I do around the house. Even though these are more modest in scope, they still require tools and materials. And where do I get them? I certainly don’t start with a pile of ore and refine it into the metals for the nails, or plant the trees that will eventually grow into lumber. My goodness, it seems that everything we do depends on the efforts of others. Our food supply, our shelter, our medical care, our ability to travel — everything. Survival without the support of uncountable others becomes just that, bare survival — with a high probability of early failure. Doesn’t this also say something about the big-ego colleagues we all occasionally encounter who insist that they know everything worth knowing and that the rest of us don’t much matter? So here we are, highly dependent on each other. But how do we decide who will do what task? This is where my thinking-while-running got really interesting. We all seem to be attracted to certain interests and career paths that, when summed together, all fit into a grand scheme that meets a surprisingly high percentage of society’s currently identified needs. And what a wonderful scheme it is! Some of us decide we want to be doctors, others decide that chemistry is a great subject to study, many seem to enjoy building things, yet others like to write, interact, or convince. And only a relatively few never seem to figure out how they can best contribute. They just keep trying — with, I suppose, survival as their major driving force. As I thought back to my own time in school, I remembered that there were certain subjects that attracted me and others that did not. Why did I like physics and not biology? Why did I find mathematics interesting — but only as it could be applied to solving physics problems. No one steered me in these directions. In fact, my mother had great expectations that I would become a concert pianist. I liked music, but not as much as physics. Later I learned that I really liked research on electron devices more than basic solid-state physics topics such as crystal structures. Why? I don’t know. However, we each seem to find a unique path, and the miracle of it all is how well all these individual paths end up fitting and blending together into a grand scheme that pretty much covers all the bases. From all this philosophizing I came to two conclusions that I would like to offer for your consideration: one applicable to the entire display community, and one important to SID. For the display community, it seems to me that those activities that allow for extensive interaction, the pooling of talents, and the free exchange of technical information are going to get us better results than if we attempt to work in isolation. Since some of us are better at developing new materials and, perhaps, innovative display devices using those materials, while others seem to have natural talents for taking these new ideas and developing them into cost-effective manufacturable products, combinations of talents are needed for commercial success. And since others of us enjoy the process of working in a factory environment to refine production processes, it is evident that the better we can become at combining these skills on a worldwide basis, the more successful we will be in meeting the rapidly evolving display needs of the Information Society. However, it is not my intent to suggest that spirited competition should not exist among companies or among the different display technologies. Such competition keeps us alert, working hard, and allows for a diversity of ideas to surface. Indeed, it is the suppression of such competition, or artificial limits imposed on the exchange of technical information, that will have a long-term detrimental effect. For the Society for Information Display, the obvious reality is that we can only succeed with active participation from a large portion of our membership. This begins at