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DEMONSTRATING THE FUTURE PERSONAL COMPUTER APPLIANCE
On Monday April 1, 1996, Bill Gates, chairman and president
of Microsoft Corp. in Redmond, Wash. showed a concept personal computer.
It was designed to be as easy to use as any common household appliance.
The Hewlett-Packard Company of Palo Alto, Calif. worked with Microsoft
to develop the system that both hope will be at home in the study, the
kitchen or the family room.
Another impetus for developing the PC appliance was to demonstrate the
Simply Interactive PC (SIPC) framework of technologies. SIPC is an initiative
to make the PC platform the center of entertainment, communication and
productivity in the home.
Technologies contained in the prototype system include the following:
• hot plug-and-play Universal Serial Bus (USB), making it easy
to add and remove peripherals;
• FireWire (IEEE 1394) high-speed video and data interface, an
emerging bus
interface standard (for portables and desktops) that provides important
linking technology so consumers can simply add multiple peripherals,
such as printers, scanners, digital cameras, camcorders and VCRs to
their systems;
• removable device bay that can accommodate a range of storage
devices from tape drives to CDs;
• infrared data interchange (works with HP organizers and notebooks);
• OnNow architecture, the industry initiative to create “instantly-available”
PC devices (see story on p. 5 and summary at left) and ;
• Microsoft Windows 95.
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