BILL GATES DISCOURSES ON THE PC THE NEXT MAJOR HOME APPLIANCE

On April 1, 1996, Bill Gates chairman and CEO of Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, Wash. made a speech before the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WINHEC 1996) in San Jose, Calif. Early in his presentation Gates said, "we still have a long way to go to make the PC an appliance," and he spent his remaining time explaining how he expected it to happen.

The enabling technology for turning the PC into an appliance is the Simply Interactive PC (SIPC) framework (see story at left). SIPC permeates the driver all the way up to the advanced elements of the Windows operating system. The technology describes new driver models, bus structures, PC packaging, and Windows extensions. A precursor to SIPC is the autoplay capability within Windows 95. With it a user can insert a CD into his PC and immediately the application on the CD runs.

“Also inside the SIPC framework is the idea of On Now,” says Gates. The premise of On Now is most PC components are turned off with a bit of logic waiting for events such as a user activating the mouse or keyboard, etc. "The On Now work is an initiative called ACPI—Advanced Configuration Power Interface—that involved key partners, including Intel and Toshiba, who are helping us drive it," Gates explained.

The foundation of SIPC is plug and play made possible by standard buses. "We have two new plug-and-play buses (that are very popular at) WINHEC this year. The universal serial bus, USB, is a daisy-chained, hot plug-and-play 10 megabits per second peripheral bus. The 1394 or Firewire is an even higher speed, and is the first evidence of the consumer electronics industry and the PC industry coming together.

Gates demonstrated a PC containing a peripherals connected via the IEEE1394 FireWire interconnect specification (see story on page 4). Apple Computer Inc. of Cupertino, Calif. developed the spec but allowed it to languish. Japanese companies looking for a simple high speed connection to tie consumer electronics together resurrected the specification. Now, it is a major standard for tying stereos, VCRs, camcorders, even set-top boxes together.

Another plug and play hardware element is standard device-bays. A standard across different system manufacturers and peripheral types allows a user to insert or remove hard disk or tape drives from a PC and have it reconfigure automatically.

A fundamental element of SIPC is the Internet. Microsoft has integrated an HTML browser in its Windows operating system. In addition, the company's ActiveX applications programming interface builds into the operating system all elements found on CD-ROM titles—animation, time lines, etc.

Microsoft's DirectX initiatives tackles 3-D graphics. "These direct initiatives have convinced games developers to move to the Windows platform,” Gates declared.” Their strong response helped define the two direct interfaces.

At a very high level, Microsoft has Active controls—Active Movie and Active VRML— that provides a 3-D capability. “The majority of popular Web pages a few years from now won't be just 2-D layouts, they’ll be 3-D environments,” Gates asserted. “You won't just see the same thing everybody else sees. You'll see something tailored to your particular profile, your location, your interests all dynamically generated on the server.”

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