In this first post in the series about the future of the computer, let’s first look back. I want to show how short-sighted we are when we look forward. Looking back, we see obvious trends like smartphones and cloud computing. But we can’t just guess those by extrapolating our knowledge of the present towards the future: it doesn’t work for the stock market and it doesn’t work for technology.

Suppose we looked forward 10 years ago. The trends back then were: faster PCs and faster Internet. Concretely:

• The processor war was about to start again. AMD launched the first 64 bit x86 processor in 2003: the K8 architecture, sold as the Opteron and the Athlon64. After that, they were first again with dual core server processors. Intel kept itself busy mainly with lawsuits. But in 2006, the giant awoke. They announced the Core architecture and started the incredibly successful tick-tock development.
• Belgacom increased its ADSL speeds to nearly 5mbit/s. They had about a million customers. Telenet was coming up strong and owned around 25% of the residential market with a customer base of around 600000.
• Mobile computing was very limited. Psion had opened Symbian to a consortium of GSM manufacturers like Nokia and Ericsson. Windows Mobile was strong in the US and the BlackBerry slowly started its victory march. It was two years before the iPhone was announced.

In 2005, it didn’t look like the smartphone had a good future. Mail worked okay: it’s what made the BlackBerry popular. But browsing wasn’t very enjoyable. Until 2004, Windows Mobile only supported a QVGA resolution (240 x 320). The state of apps was just as miserable. Even Apple didn’t have an app store in iOS 1.0. If you wanted to install an app, you had to google it, download it and jailbreak your iPhone.

The future, it seemed, belonged to the laptop. Indeed, in 2007 Intel considered mobile processors powerful enough to base a new type of small laptops around them: the netbooks. These had Wi-Fi and sometimes 3G as connectivity. In 2005, nobody saw it coming that mobile computing would be thoroughly revolutionised by smartphones and apps. And then I haven’t even mentioned tablets.

Today, it looks obvious that the future belongs to the smartphones and their apps. But that doesn’t mean that’s what the future will look for. What it means is that we have gotten used to smartphones and apps. Just like Henry Ford’s “faster horses”, we mostly expect more of the same, only better. Chances are slim that that’s the only thing we will be getting. That’s why I’m looking at a few trends that may be worrying or controversial.

Will the future look exactly as I say it will? Who knows. But I expect to recognise a few elements.

Which trends do you see under the surface at this moment? Will they determine the future of the computer? Let me know in the comments below!