Craig Dupler’s Post

I think Pete Wells' sign-off article in today's NYT is a must read for anyone interested in technology, it's impacts on society, or what a good restaurant experience should be like. I spent the first couple months of 1997 running around the country visiting innovative device makers who were doing things with Microsoft's small platform (it had a lot of names including Windows CE). I was looking for what I called a "magic box" that combined several features from different devices in a variety of very different industries. Mind you, this was a full decade before Steve Jobs did his introductory iPhone demonstration. What I was after was a small portable device on which we could install apps for use in super secure machine area networks, with white listed relationships with our switch/router infrastructure such that packets would only be sent by the infrastructure to devices that were specifically authorized to receive packets from the sending device using our own private GUID system (not MAC, EICN, etc.). I also wanted it to be able to be a VoIP phone with full telephony capability other than text, except via a "text over analog speech" channel that had been digitized. Again, this would make it safe to use around factory equipment such as AGVs, and other dangerous things. Well, you still can't buy that box. It is possible to have them made-up custom, but it's such an obvious industrial need, I did not and still do not believe that a company like Boeing should have to pay the price points that would be required for such a device. Cell phones have become a social disaster, while at the same time are pieces of unsafe crap for applications that are crying out for something very much like them, yet different.

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