How far?

Way back in 1994, we were worried about how our PCs would cope with the new-fangled plug-and-play features in the forthcoming Windows 95, marvelling at how thousands of new Internet users signed up every month, and praising those PCs that included a CD drive. I remember how some of my friends (yours truly included) made a pilgrimage to a friend's house just to see his new computer that had an astonishing 233MHz Pentium II – MMX processor!

Jump forward to the present, and we're wondering how our PCs might cope with Vista's 3D user interface and lavishing praise on laptop makers for bundling HD DVD drives. The dizzying speed of progress in the PC industry is quite amazing but even I find myself wondering whether things have really improved so much and whether computers today are really 20-30 times as fast as they were ten years ago.

The truth is it is practically impossible to draw a fair comparison of computers spanning even a decade of innovations. The software and hardware combinations we use today are very different to those of 10 years ago. As broadband Internet and video on demand are facts of life for many computer users today, only fifteen years ago, 56k modems were being featured in shows like "Beyond 2000" as cutting edge technology that will define life in the 21st Century!

But what about the future? The world has awaited the promises of Artificial Intelligence to revolutionise computer usage for many years, and perhaps grown tired of it. On the other hand, content discovery technology that is capable of interpreting the meaning of different media elements such as text, audio and video based on semantics and perhaps even cultural significance may just be the next best thing that's just around the corner. There is also an idea to move the hundreds of applications on your computer to a single interface – making it possible for you to use one common interface for word-processing, while listening to music and rendering 3D animations.

It's impossible to make these predictions with any degree of certainty, except that the ideas that will shape the future are being brewed at this very moment inside the minds of youthful visionaries in the lecture halls and classrooms of today.