Ten years ago, MS-DOS was the dominant operating system on personal computers. Ten years from now, Windows 95 is sure to be consigned to the cobwebs of PC antiquity. What will replace it? If the future-tripping Starfire: A Vision of Future Computing video is any indication, we may not be concerned with puny operating systems at all.
Starfire is the work of Bruce Tognazzini, a human-interface guru who championed several key features of the Macintosh interface while at Apple. (See "In Your Interface, page 134.) Set in 2004, the video tells the tale of a Detroit auto executive, whose powerful Starfire computer pal helps her meet deadlines and beat out her macho, cutthroat departmental rival. With voice and gesture recognition, telepresence, VR, globally networked database retrieval driven by intelligent agents, and real-time image capture/manipulation applications, Starfire is the logical extension of Apple's Knowledge Navigator vision of the mid-'80s - full of special-effects wizardry, layers of design, and obscured meaning.
Underneath its marketing zeal, Starfire inadvertently raises the question, What will the value of an individual's work be in the postmillennial workplace? Depicting a day in the life of a "knowledge worker," the video portrays a world where time manipulation is the status quo. Watching the lines between the constructs of work and leisure completely blur - every minute of the day is mapped out, strategized, and agent-allocated to the merciless battle of corporate competition - one wonders if a Starfire world would be one where ultrapowerful machines gave us more time, or demanded more time from us.
Starfire: A Vision of Future Computing (Directors' Cut): US$9.95, plus $3.50 shipping and handling. Sun Microsystems Inc.: (800) 294 4404, +1 (916) 939 1000, fax +1 (916) 939 1010.
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