"They told me not to do it," confessed Intel's burly president and chief executive, Mr Craig Barrett, during his keynote speech at a conference in Palm Springs, California. But he did it anyway. He plonked his behind on top of one of his company's "concept computers", saying: "It's an Ottoman PC: you gotta be able to sit on the damn thing!" And while it may not be the first computer with built-in seating - Seymour Cray's Cray 1 supercomputer pioneered that idea - Sozo Design's Ottoman PC is certainly the first with additional coffee-table and foot-stool functionality.
Intel showed more than a dozen concept PCs at its twice-yearly professional developers' conference, where more than 2,000 engineers gathered to learn how to build tomorrow's PCs. There were designs for almost every room in the e-home, including Anderson Design's easy-to-clean Vesta Kitchen PC running BeOS. This can be operated via a touch-sensitive LCD screen or voice commands. (It avoids messing up a keyboard while making pastry.)
Not many concept PC designs will reach the market. The Barbie PC (for girls) and Hot Wheels PC (for boys), produced by Patriot Computers and toy giant Mattel, will, but these are conventional systems, apart from the decorative designs. However, South Korea's Daewoo is putting three colourful concept PCs into production - the orange Argo, the yellow NeTeen and the purple Luxor - in November.
Whether anyone will buy them is another matter, but there are grounds for optimism. First, there is a growing market for multiple purchases, particularly in the US. Families buying their third or fourth PC for their kids might just buy the kid-oriented PCs like Yeong Yang Technology's Magic Bean.
Second, the success of Apple's iMac is encouraging PC manufacturers to (in Apple's advertising slogan) think different. Of course, some suppliers tried producing coloured or oddly-shaped PCs before, but before the iMac, everyone laughed at them.
Third, the whole basis of PC design may be changing dramatically. At least, Intel hopes so.
The traditional "boring beige box" is based on two fundamental ideas. One is compatibility: your standard PC is designed to accept hardware add-ons and to run software that dates back to the dawn of the PC era: the launch of the IBM PC in 1981. The other is expandability: it's possible to whip the lid off a PC, add more memory, upgrade the processor, plug in a new graphics card, and perhaps even swap a CD-rom drive for a DVD-rom.
Compatibility and expandability provide interchangeability. You can install any beige or cream CD-rom or floppy disk drive into any standard PC: it will work, and it will not look out of place. Interchangeability also provides large markets and drives down prices. As many unfortunate buyers have learned too late, non-standard parts can be very expensive indeed. Or unobtainable.
The "concept PC" is an attempt to change the rules. Instead of absolute compatibility, Intel is promoting "legacy reduction". In other words, most new-style PCs won't accept most old-style addons. The 1983-vintage ISA (industry standard architecture) expansion slots have to go, as do the standard modem and printer ports, the mouse port and the keyboard socket. Even the old VGA (video graphics array) standard for monitors will be dumped, to be replaced by Intel's digital visual interface (DVI).
In the concept PC, almost everything has to be connected via new-style USB (Universal Serial Bus) ports. These USB ports also provide most of the expandability. Instead of opening up the computer's case and plugging things in, users must usually attach peripherals via USB cables or by other means, such as Bluetooth wireless connections. (Bluetooth is an industry-standard system heavily promoted by Intel. The first Bluetooth products are expected late this year.)
The iMac has already made similar changes, sacrificing expandability and compatibility for style and (except for the horrible mouse and, perhaps, the keyboard) ease of use. But it is easier for Apple to do this, since it has monopoly control of the Macintosh market. In the freewheeling PC world, standards are set by what sells.
In the long term, users will benefit from legacy reduction because it has proved difficult or impossible to make vintage PC features work with Plug & Play features such as automatic installation. The result should be PCs that are much easier to use.
In the short term, however, it creates problems for people who have already bought mice, keyboards, scanners, printers, monitors and other peripherals that may not plug in to their easy-touse PCs without expensive adaptors.
