PC stands for Personal Computer (no prizes there), these days we have iPhones, Laptops, Blackberries, Palm Pilots, Consoles which are all basically PC's...

But when someone says PC we immediately think of a bulky box that sits on a table somewhere, with a screen, keyboard, mouse and so forth; the Desktop monster sprouting cables and filling itself with dust every 3 months.

Many consoles share more or less the same hardware as our PC's, the only real difference between an Xbox 360 and a PS3 and your PC is the operating system. Hardware abstraction layers could easily (easy as in would require some doing but no more or less than building any other virtual machine interface which open source geeks seem to always be doing) get your PS3 to run Xbox games, or your PC to run PS3 games, or your PS3 to run Windows 7.

So technically speaking the difference between consoles and PC's is virtually nonexistant... The only tangible difference seems to be the choice by the manufacturers to cripple the ability of the machines to run only proprietary software.

So, given all of this, what are people's thoughts on the future of the PC as a gaming platform, and even the future of consoles as a "personal computing" platform. Will we be firing up our PS4 to do some accounting? Or hopping on the Xbox to do a video conference call during a board meeting?

I have my own thoughts but I'd like to see what other people think.

Well the PC will always have its FPS & its tactical RPGs, that's for sure. There's something about having a chair + keyboard + mouse + screen that allows us for more continuous gaming than a console would

Consoles are gradually becoming a bit like PCs, on the PS3 you could run Linux on it if you wanted to & patches are now actually a mainstream word for consoles too. Before in PS2/Xbox era if you had some kind of problem you had to live with it whereas the glory of the PC always had the advantage of being able to get fixed. Firmware updates are a bit like Service Packs, always adding new features & giving it power saving features, once again, stuff that used to be exclusive to PCs. And then of course there's upgradeable HDDs! USB slots, internet browsing, SD slots, etc, it really is becoming a mini PC of sorts - a console laptop so to speak

However I think consoles will hit a limit where it cannot surpass the advantages of the PC. PCs will always be around for a very long time I think and hopefully with a side of gaming still, even if its just Solitaire & Minesweeper

The way I see it is along similar lines... There seems to be a converging trend with all technologies and as much as I laughed at Bill Gates in the 90's with his futuristic prophecy about this exact thing happening, well here we are and it's well on the way.

There's much to be said about the utility of various different computer-using poses.

I agree the table and chair with monitor situation can't be beat for a workstation setup requiring long hours of use - it's a different thing to reclining in the couch far back from a big screen TV idly blasting moving figures or enjoying some DVD's, which is different to another situation where you need a handheld device with its own screen, which you can use to take photos, make calls and send quick messages and emails.

But how far will the converging trend go? Will we eventually see some kind of handheld device with the power to run visually immersive games in high definition via a wireless link to either a desktop workstation or home entertainment system while simultaneously being used as a smartphone? Like an iPhone on steroids... Maybe the level of miniaturisation of such power seems impossible... but is it?

Once I laughed at the idea of handheld computers being used as portable media centers integrated with our stereos and internet connections but now it's happened, and I feel it has to go further.

Ok so those are my thoughts on PC's... The phrase Personal Computer seems to be comimg more and more apt as time passes.

I agree with you that the term PC has become less meaningful, as the ability to perform computing tasks becomes more prevalent across multiple platforms. Aside from the form factor, and slight incompatibilities, surfing the web from an iPhone is essentially the same as on a desktop. You can see the same information, same pictures, and interact with websites in the same way (for most part, at least).

The key to any convergence (or divergence) is in software portability and form factor. Software that allows for multiple points of access will spur convergence. Imagine if your word document can be read and edited across any hardware that you own. It already happens on Blackberrys (Blackberries?)

And Microsoft's new Live Anywhere concept seems to be pointing that direction for games. You can access the same game on your console, PC or phone.

But form factor still remains a crucial factor in the equation. Surfing the web may be convenient on the iPhone, but it sure strains the eyes. Working on a spreadsheet is also probably more feasible with a mouse and keyboard.

These two elements of software portability and form factor suggests to me that cloud computing will be an endpoint for convergence. Any machine that can process data will process any kind of data. And the way you access it depends on the form factor of your preference. When any device can become a PC, then no single device is a PC.

And related to what I've said above, I'm extremely interested in seeing what the OnLive service brings to the gaming market.

I don't know if this specific company can deliver everything they claim. But the logic is sound. And they aren't the ones who do it, somebody else will perfect the formula.

I see the term PC becoming less meaningful in describing the lumpy boxes on our desks as the underlying technologies are seeping into pretty much everything around us, but it's also becoming more meaningful in that we're starting to carry around a quantity of computation power once reserved for desktops on our very person.

These devices are already capable of interfacing with our senses and tactile responses - we can shake them, we can connect them to a HUD built into a simple pair of glasses, they can track body movement and read our voices, their cameras can detect our facial expressions and respond accordingly (the "smile sensor" in my Samsung phone's camera software). What we see around us now is only the cumbersome and bumbling tip of the integration of computing with our bodies. O-led contact lenses have been prototyped which are powered solely by the radio signal used to feed the computer image to them - having an in built personal video display of any resolution, brightness and transparency we desire which needs no batteries and may play a part of human / pc interaction in the future.

Rather than a monitor and keyboard, if we desire to work at a "desktop" the system could formulate the appearance of keys and a "mouse" or "puck" we can directly manipulate on a "screen" (or several virtual screens). If you desire a console gaming experience, you could darken the background of your vision and "grab" a virtual controller (or assume the correct hand movements for various actions). Physical form would be obsolete, virtual form would become a matter of personal preference.

You raise a good point about cloud computing. So far, it's pretty useless in the mainstream for graphical intensive apps because of the lag between client and server and the ungodly prices companies charge for bandwidth - but looking at the 4th generation mobile communications specifications perhaps this future is closer than many people realise.

In a sense.... we are already becoming cyborgs. Although not via surgical means how much are personal computing devices becoming integrated with our bodily systems?

Wireless routers can be used to track locations of moving people via the shadows the body leaves in the radio field; these early experiments are rudimentary at best and can still accurately pinpoint locations and movements of a body through walls. As wireless technology becomes more firmly embedded and these access points become more accurate at locating and identifying body shape, there is no real reason why they shouldn't be capable of detecting and responding to subtle body gestures.

These kind of direct body -> machine technologies already being developed will only perfect over time, and it's not unreasonable to assume that eventually form factor itself will become technologically obsolete - the very technologies used to feed data to our computer displays will also power them and detect our subtle interactions with them - technologically it's inevitable that this will be possible...

But it's a case of the market accepting it. Human issues and ethics may steer this more so than the drive to innovate and improve technology.

Will people just go "nah, I don't wanna be part machine?" or will the usefulness of the technology eventually lead to widespread adoption?
Will certain privacy implications lead to a social rejection of such technologies - a central cloud-computing network capable of detecting and responding to individual body movements as well as directing what augmented realities the person interacts with would no doubt wish to record such data for security purposes - who would have access?
What about safety limitations - malfunctioning body-mounted O-led displays may have inbuilt failsafes to prevent obstruction of vision in cases where the network becomes unavailable or data becomes corrupted, but what if the network is compromised and a worm causes people to start seeing moving vehicles approaching directly in front of them - this could cause road accidents...
Or alternatively, these displays could mask what the user is actually seeing to the extent where a gifted criminal hacker could render "nothing" where they are located while they move around with impunity, virtually invisible to the cyborg eye.
Perhaps the stereotypical case of the technophobic underclasses of society as depicted in many a dystopian sci-fi novel rebelling against the "cyborg" people (too reliant on their augmented senses, to comfortable, complacent, compliant and reduced to unthinking robots of the people in control of the networks) could cause a Dune-esque backlash against computer technology and plunge us back into the technological dark ages.

Ok... going wayyy off track here. But hey, the future never ceases to interest me.

I did start this post with the intent of discussing near-future developments... but my imagination got the better of me (I am a tragic for technology)... that, and I don't think these things are beyond the scope of my lifetime. I may be wrong of course, my grandparents believed people would be living on the moon by now and some of them have passed away waiting... But I guess it doesn't hurt to imagine.

I guess Microsoft's "Live anywhere" is a baby step towards all of this potential.

What I was really hoping for with the release of windows 7 was the Direct X integration with the remote desktop. It was promised and promised and it was in the beta and.... Never came. That would have been uber cool to stream directx games over a network to any Direct X equipped computer. Maybe the market just wasn't ready?

Man, this is almost wasted on the forums. You should have pitched that as a column, man

Just to chip in a thought, though, I think that the term 'PC' has grown into its own identity, free from strict acronym. As such, a PC will likely commonly refer to a computer that is say on or by a desk, complimented by a keyboard and mouse for the duration of our lifetimes. This will be mostly desktops, and as most will extend to larger laptops (my own 17" G71 A2 being among them).

This would be incorrect when looking at the history of the words in the English language, but as a kind of an evolution it's already happening.

Thanks Tim. I have a bad habit of overwhelming not only the people around me but also myself with an endless stream of half baked ideas, it's hard to tell whether to take my ramblings seriously or not. I can certainly take the time to clean my ideas up, cite references for my claims etc, I know my wall of text writing style can be tl;dr, it's just in my current mood I can barely type fast enough to keep up with my thoughts...

I would like to think that you are right, that this cyborg-esque vision of the future will not eventuate too rapidly and I can spend the rest of my life comfortable with the same tools I grew up with and understand, but everything changes, and its interesting to step back and get some perspective on just how quickly change occurs.

When I was born about 29 years ago, the internet was a twinkle in Arpanet's eye. In the 80's, even though C64's and Z80 based computers were "mainstream" and many large corporations at that time used dumb terminals connected to a mainframe it was still very niche to possess ones own computer at home.

When I was in high school, I was one of the very few kids who actually had a "real" computer with a basic 1200 baud modem - most other kids had consoles (if anything), and an occasional businessman or government worker used a work-supplied PC or laptop for accounting and document writing. Now every kid from millionaires down to families living in shared government housing own at least one computer and a reasonable internet connection.

In a similar time frame, mobile phones went from being massive bricks used only by millionaires and company executives via satellites to slim devices where the actual "phone" bits fit on the tip of your finger (the rest is screen, buttons and form for people to grasp), connecting via a vast array of radio towers disguised as trees and light posts dotting every prominent hill in this vast country of ours (and indeed the whole world) which 15 or 20 years ago simply didn't exist - even children can text each other with silly messages. Masses of infrastructure have sprung into existence in an incredibly short time period.

15 years ago, if I was riding my bike down to the beach and a friend wanted to catch up to listen to some tunes on the stereo or read some comics, he could call me at home (we still had a rotary dial on our phone even then), but if I wasn't home tough luck, he'll have to try later, or see me the next day, or try to guess that I probably went down the beach and go for a ride himself. Nowadays if I don't answer my phone for some reason, and the person tries again 3 minutes later and again 3 minute later, I think gee it must be urgent but no - they're just bored and wanting to chat about stuff. Or if I don't answer 15 minutes later I get a text "What's up? U ignorin me:)" - the technology provides instant communication and now people demand it of each other, it's considered rude to return a call the next day, as if there's some incessant burning need to fill some big empty space in the world with gossip about insignificant minutiae.

Such changes to the world made by personal computing advances have been very rapid indeed. Some studies have shown that without "norms" and "constants" people can become unstable as there seems to be nothing solid to anchor their perspective of reality upon. This is where the pull between tradition and innovation (the generation gap syndrome) seems to come from. It seems in my generation, change itself has become the norm. Strange how the human mind adapts to situations so far removed from our tribal root-munching and animal-clubbing.

Now the first "internet generation" (people who never saw a world without internet) has hit university age, there is little doubt in my mind that we're going to start seeing a whole lot of new ideas from the kids who grew up with the technology and therefore know it more intimately (from early childhood) than us older folk. Google and texting is just a part of their world environment, whereas for myself and other 30ish guys it was something we kind of stumbled through as it appeared and made changes to our lives. To us it's something that was new to us and we found great and useful for things, for them they grew up with it and are probably full of ideas of what could work better, things that have bugged them since day one which they intend to improve upon.

Like some man said (I think it might have been Newton or some other greybeard) "that we can see so far today, it is only because we stand on the shoulders of giants. "

Would that it be the little bastards stop climbing up our backs, but they won't. Did we, when we were in their shoes? To me it's both alarming and exciting to think everything I know and thought I knew about the present and future of technology is very likely going to change much faster than I can keep up. Part of me wants to stay within my comfort zone, but another part of me really wants to see what comes next.

I think PC gaming will kind of stay around for the near future, but it's a dying beast, you can sort of tell by the kmart factor - they're only stocking a couple of bashed up looking "educational" games in the corner of the games aisle (old stock no one will buy) - soon PC's will be relegated back to a pure workstation which will soon lose its core processing abilities via cloud computing (aka back to the old mainframe style infrastructure but on a global scale).

Games will become more and more the domain of gaming machines but as internet infrastructure begins to allow live streaming of high def 3d graphics without noticeable lag these too will lose their processing abilities and become nodes on the cloud. This is not that far off, I give it 10, 15 years tops. Then, since both desktop and gaming console computers are mere nodes, it's more than likely they will merge into one and you can dock your node in the tv for gaming, or your desktop keyboard for work, and a variety of other uses I haven't thought of (swipe it at the checkout to buy shopping?).

I mean as comfortable as I am with my PC here on my desk, it's only because I am used to it. Its whirring fans are almost a solace to me on a subconscious level like the slight hiss on an old vinyl. The tangled cables inside, the intermittent hard drive failures and accumulation of dust are quaint little foibles I can tut and fuss over like granddad fussing over a broken spring in the gramophone or the difficulty of procuring Super-8 film these days.

It seems like complete science fiction, just like TV in the 1920's and home computing in the 1950's. But the resonant feedback loop between art and life has demonstrated its ability over the history of human culture to cascade into manifest reality.

It is true that the market dictates the adoption of new ideas. And the market often prefers to stick with the trusted and comfortable items it grew up with and knows well. So it's very likely we'll still see physical hardware computers right up until we die - as long as we still buy them someone will still make them.

The children of my generation are growing up constantly exposed to mobile phones and small handheld personal computers, they're in tune with integrated internet use and small scale gadgets such as in-car GPS's and mini mp3 players more so than PC's and consoles, and this will likely define the "safe" technology of their generation.

What about our grandchildren? In 12 - 15 years time (when I am in my 40's) my daughter will be having children of her own. By that time, cloud computing will probably be the norm, who knows what they'll be growing up with? I doubt by that time children will be sporting their own personal ocular implants but there's still another 10 to 30 years of my life after that point (assuming I don't die accidentally or succumb to a fatal illness in the interceding period).

But I for one would like to do away once and for all with the endless stream of gadgets - once we strip away all these extraneous things and the personal computer moulds into our lives seamlessly without the wires and boxes and fuss, I think our focus can shift from the technology to other issues, like life and the people around us.

Imagine for a second a world without TV screens, desktops, laptops, mobile phones, monitors, keyboards, mice, modems, routers, cables and so forth. Say goodbye to static-free cloths, tv stands, DVD cases, hifi units, large office desks, filing cabinets, hifi speakers, socket strips, wall warts, carry bags...

How much less waste there would be not having to mine, refine, transport, manufacture, package, store, sell and transport (again) all that stuff? People would still need furniture to sleep on, sit on, eat upon and relax with of course, but just about any surface would do for a simulated workstation / gaming / web browsing experience - you could customise your virtual environment precisely to your liking.

It would be like stepping back into the early 1800's in terms of home furnishing requirements with an invisible fabric of high tech communications technology flowing all throughout - in contrast to the bombastic in-your-face "Look at my stuff!" clutter of modern households.

I have a feeling this future will go one of two ways: Stranger and more excellent than I can possibly dream or revert back to tribal savagery following a wide scale global nuclear war between China and America.

I have to apologise for this post being so long. I swear I am not always this long winded! In any subject it's hard to define a fair and reasonable scope which doesn't leave out any important bits, and if I blew the scope out of expected proportions here it's only that this is a subject I am passionate about - the history and future of computing technology from a holistic perspective always gets me going - I hope it doesn't bother you guys too much! And I sure hope it's not wasted

I don't have much more to add to your post, except perhaps to unravel a few themes present inside.

The future of the PC, as a platform, or even as a concept lies in:
1) The way data is accessed (whether through a handheld, or through, as you say, implants into the human body).
2) The way data is managed (storage [centralised, decentralised or cloud], distribution [internet, physical distribution], encoding [readability, ability to share, security]).

These will have the knock-on effects of technology on:
1) social behaviour (etiquette, social norms and expectations, modes of interaction)
2) environment (infrastructure, use of resources [such as paper for printing, or raw materials for building said infrastructure], architectural design)

And I think the video below demonstrates one possible stream of the future. Which looks both terrifying and exciting at the same time.

Augmented (hyper)Reality

How useless was the guy at making tea!

That Augmented Reality is pretty close to what I was thinking but obviously there should be a ban on primary colors - and laws about advertising clutter (perhaps zoning laws disallowing too much advertising in residential areas).

Other than that, you've pretty much summed up where I was heading.

On a belatedly related note... Looks like the mainstream media saw my post...

edition.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/06/...se/index.html?hpt=C1