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Blink.

Blink.

Blink.

The glaring white underscore flashes in front of my weary eyes next to letters arranged in a peculiar fashion.

c colon backslash blink.

The cathode ray is the only thing illuminating the room, since all the lights are off.  It's 3 in the morning, after all.  Don't tell me you've never been there.  Don't tell me you don't remember the days.

After a nightmare afternoon of tearing my hair out has turned into a nightmare evening of juggling extended memory with base memory with swap files, twelve hours later, I still haven't managed to persuade Linda - my old P90 - to crack on with Quake 2.  For crying out loud.

Fast forward a decade or so and I have a computer in my pocket powerful enough to play Quake 2 and more.  More's the point, I can play Quake 3 in a browser window, the entire game recoded in a ridiculously lightweight language that makes a mockery of my PC-gaming youth.

Who can see the future of computing?  Well, arguably it's not that hard.  It's fair to assume that the power of a given computing platform or form factor will roughly double every 18 months or so.  It's fair to assume that the corollary of this is that the size of device required to perform a task roughly halves every 18 months. Well, up to the point where one is required to type on a simple device which has just a screen and no buttons.  I can't imagine how on earth that would work.  Sounds ludicrous.

Regardless, the title of this blog post was supposed to be 'The Future of Netbooks'.  Only, it seems like the future of netbooks is relatively safe to predict.  I mean, given the ubiquity of the Intel Atom platform now integrated into 95% of the machines of the market, it's fair to say that the future of netbooks is, well, the next iteration of that platform.  Faster processor.  More memory.  Bigger storage.  Better graphics.  It's also fair to assume that netbooks aren't really going to get bigger, since then they'd be laptops, or smaller, since then they'd be phones.  3G integration might become standard I suppose, but we're not about to see anything more drastic than that, I'd muster.

No, the future of netbooks isn't really about the hardware platform.  We know what that is.  The future of netbooks is intimately tied up with the bizarre amount of computing tasks that become possible as time marches on.

For example.  Today, netbooks are pretty useless for gaming.  You might just about muster a game of Counter-Strike (pre-Source, mind you), but the idea of truly portable PC gaming is probably just a platform iteration away.  Combine a 9" screen with a 2.5GHz Atom, next-gen integrated graphics and a 3G card and you've probably got the most compact, high-performance World of Warcraft machine ever invented.  The idea that a machine of that size could play the most popular game available on the PC seems, to my decade-old self still fiddling with extended memory, laughable.

But there we are.  Windows 7, which will come in a very nice built-for-netbook variety, is probably using more memory just to draw a window than poor Linda had to draw an entire 3D world.  Not to mentioning managing an internet connection based on a chip the size of thumbnail that outperforms, by a factor of 20, my decade-old internet connection that required a big black box, a physical phone line and a tolerance of incredibly annoying squawks.

So the thing that is next for netbooks is not really hardware.  That's really lined up and planned already.  No, the next thing for netbooks is the ability to do anything you can do on a desktop today on a 9" screen with a permanent internet connection tomorrow.  And just how cool is that?