The 10 most important technologies you never think about

by Neil McAllister

April 30, 2008 —

The late sci-fi author Arthur
C. Clarke famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable
from magic.

We certainly live in a magical world. We're surrounded by technology, yet we
seldom stop to consider the amazing advances that we've come to rely on every
day. Whether we're surfing the Web, making a call on our mobile phones, or watching
a DVD movie on our big-screen TV, we take our modern conveniences for granted.

Here, then, is a peek inside the magician's hat at ten technologies that are
keys to our digital age. Without realizing it, you've probably used at least
one of them already today--if not all. But whether you're aware of them or not,
without these technologies our world would be a very different place.

Unicode

We use computers for every kind of communication, from IM to e-mail to writing
the Great American Novel. The trouble is, computers don't speak our language.
They're all digital; before they can store or process text, every letter, symbol,
and punctuation mark must first be translated into numbers.

So which numbers do we use? Early PCs relied on a code called ASCII,
which took care of most of the characters used in Western European languages.
But that's not enough in the age of the World Wide Web. What about Cyrillic,
Hindi, or Thai?

Enter Unicode, the Rosetta
Stone of computing. The Unicode
standard defines a unique number for every letter, symbol, or glyph in more
than 30 written languages, and it's still growing. At nearly 1500 pages and
counting, it's incredibly complex, but it's been gaining traction ever since
Microsoft adopted it as the internal encoding for the Windows
NT family of operating systems.

Most of us will never need to know which characters map to which Unicode numbers,
but modern computing could scarcely do without Unicode. In fact, it's what's
letting you read this article in your Web browser, right now.

Digital Signal Processing

Digital music, digital photos, digital videos: It's easy to forget that we
live in a fundamentally analog world. Computers can cope with all that we see
and hear only through the application of highly
complex mathematics, a field known as digital signal processing (DSP).

Wherever you find digital media, DSP is at work, facilitated by a whole subcategory
of specialized chips and circuits. DSP algorithms correct for errors while your
optical drive reads the music off a CD. They're at work again as you compress
the audio into an MP3 file, and again when you play it back through your surround-sound
speakers.

DSP is to digital media as gears and springs are to a pocket watch. It works
its magic below the surface: invisible, yet totally essential. It's safe to
say that without it, virtually none of the digital technologies that we take
for granted today--from DVDs to mobile phones, ink jet printers to DSL broadband--would
be possible.

Managed code

Programming is a lot more complicated than it used to be. Modern operating
systems are like onions, with layers upon layers of subsystems to interconnect
and manage. Worse, bugs and unnoticed security flaws, even ones that may have
once seemed trivial, can be serious threats in the Net-connected era.

For a growing number of developers, the solution is to use platforms designed
to relieve
some of the burden. Programs written for such managed-code environments
as Java and Microsoft's .NET don't run on the bare hardware the way traditional
programs do. Instead, a virtual machine acts as an intermediary between the
software and the system. It's like a robot nanny for computer programs, silently
taking care of memory management and other housekeeping drudgery while keeping
an eye out for potential security violations before they happen.

To an end user, a managed-code program may seem no different than a traditional
one, but software that runs in a virtual machine makes for a more reliable,
stable, and secure computing experience. And with .NET rapidly becoming the
preferred platform for Windows development, managed code may soon be the norm,
rather than the exception.

Transistors

Later this year, Intel plans to unveil the world's first integrated circuit
to contain 2
billion transistors. Moore's Law says that the number of transistors we
can put into integrated circuits will double approximately every two years.
That's a lot of transistors--but what do they all do?

Simply put, the
transistor may well be the greatest invention of the 20th century. It's
really nothing more than a voltage-controlled switch, but that humble description
hides incredible power. Linked together in various ways, transistors can form
circuits that are the basis of every type of digital logic, right up to the
CPUs
that power our modern PCs and servers.

What makes today's chips so powerful is the industry's ability to cram components
ever closer together. The transistors on the processor inside your PC might
be only about 100 atoms across, and improvements
in manufacturing technology will keep them shrinking--at least, for the
time being.

Someday, optical
chips or even quantum
processors may replace current chip designs and outperform them many times
over. For now, we'll have to content ourselves with continuing to improve upon
an oft-ignored technology that has served us for 50 years and counting.

XML

You've probably heard of XML, but what is it? Where is it?

Though you may never have encountered it directly, XML
is everywhere. Now in its tenth
year, it has become virtually the lingua franca of data exchange.

XML stands for "extensible markup language" -- extensible
because developers can add to it to suit the needs of particular applications.
But what makes it really valuable is the fact that it's a language, much like
HTML. Unlike some data formats, XML files aren't just streams of incomprehensible
numbers. XML is designed to be read by humans as well as machines. A developer
who "speaks XML" can look at a document written in an unfamiliar XML
dialect and still understand what it's trying to say.

This powerful combination of features makes XML incredibly useful for all kinds
of applications. But perhaps its biggest coup was Microsoft's decision to switch
to XML-based file formats for Office
2007. As it turns out, you actually may have XML documents sitting on your
desktop right now, without realizing it.

Nonvolatile RAM

Isn't it strange? Your pockets stay the same size, yet you can carry more and
more in them every year.

In 1956, IBM's first
hard drives used disks that were 2 feet wide. It's hard to believe that
today's microscale drives use essentially the same technology. Incremental advances,
such as the discovery of giant
magnetoresistance and the invention of perpendicular
recording heads, have produced staggering results. Between 1990 and 2005,
magnetic hard drives increased their storage capacity a
thousandfold, putting even Moore's Law to shame.

But even with those astounding improvements, hard drives hit a wall when it
came to portable devices. They were still too big and too fragile for many gadgets.
Enter solid-state
drives based on non-volatile RAM. The technology has been used for storage
since the 1970s, but it remained phenomenally expensive until manufacturing
processes caught up with the demand. Now it is everywhere: in MP3 players like
the newest
Creative Zen, and in digital cameras, cell phones, and even some laptops.

Manufacturers aren't sitting still; cutting-edge technologies such as "racetrack
memory" could lead to solid-state storage that is smaller, faster,
and more reliable than ever.

Lithium ion batteries

When we were kids, our toys came "batteries not included." With our
grown-up, high-tech toys, on the other hand, the battery is often one of the
most
important features. As essential as mobility has become to how we use technology,
it simply wouldn't be possible if our choices were still limited to D, C, and
AA.

The invention of lithium ion batteries was the key. The earliest rechargeables
were made with lead--hardly a prescription for portability. But because lithium
is the lightest metal, lithium-based batteries can store more energy at a given
weight than any other variety. Lighter batteries mean smaller, lighter devices;
beginning in the 1990s, you could actually put a phone in your pocket.

Running time remains an ongoing challenge, but researchers have no shortage
of solutions. In addition to improved
lithium ion batteries that use nanotechnology, a number of battery alternatives
are slowly coming to market, including ultracapacitors
and fuel
cells. In fact, pardon me for saying that battery technology is poised for
its next big
explosion--and personal technology is sure to advance because of it.

Voice over IP (VoIP)

You've made a few Skype
calls and you've looked into digital
phone service from your broadband provider, but that's as close as you've
gotten to VoIP (voice over IP) technology. Or so you think. In truth, VoIP is
revolutionizing the telecom industry, blurring the lines between voice calls
and digital networks.

Those prepaid
calling cards that offer rock-bottom international rates? VoIP makes them
possible. Similarly, a growing number of businesses
use VoIP behind the scenes to eliminate long-distance charges between branch
offices.

Routing calls over the Internet circumvents traditional telephone company charges,
and fewer fees and taxes mean lower
prices. Digital calls are easier to direct and manage, which makes them
attractive even to traditional telephone companies. Don't be surprised if soon
the landline you've lived with forever is replaced by an all-digital alternative--though
you'll likely be none the wiser.

Graphics acceleration

Thought your fancy video card was only good for gaming? Think again. Its graphics
processing unit (GPU) is really like a second, highly specialized CPU. When
it comes to certain kinds of complex math, its performance puts your desktop
CPU to shame.

Until recently, all that power went to waste when you weren't chalking
up frags. But computer scientists are finding novel ways to use GPU acceleration
to speed up applications off-screen, as well. For example, a
Stanford University project-- which uses many PCs around the world acting
together as a supercomputer to assist protein folding-related disease research--can
offload calculations to the GPU to multiply its performance many times.

Because the kind of calculations used to draw 3D graphics are also applicable
to many other problems, GPU acceleration is potentially useful for a wide variety
of applications, from math-intensive science and engineering to complex database
queries. Newer, even more complex chips--such as nVidia's Aegia
physics engine--can do even more. No wonder nVidia has begun working on
chips
for the workstation market.

Increasingly, your PC's performance won't depend on the speed of any single
chip. As AMD and Intel get into the game, expect future
desktop CPUs to incorporate CPU and GPU capabilities into a single, multicore
package, bringing the best of both worlds to gamers and nongamers alike.

High-speed net access

Where would we be without fast Internet access? It's easy to forget that just
10 years ago, most of us were still using ordinary
modems. The broadband revolution ushered in streaming video, MP3 downloads,
Internet phone calls, and multiplayer online gaming. And we owe it all to TV.

In the 1980s, cable companies were promising 500 channels of round-the-clock
programming. Cable was poised to become the most important wire into the house;
but the telephone companies had an ace up their sleeve. A new technology could
push high-frequency signals over ordinary phone lines, which previously had
been good only for low-bandwidth voice calls. The telephone companies saw this
as an opportunity to offer video on demand and to compete with the cable companies
at their own game.

Or so they thought. The plans of the telcos for video on demand dried up by
the mid-1990s, but the technology remained. Now called DSL, it had morphed into
a high-speed household on-ramp to the Internet. The cable companies followed
suit with a comparable technology, and the broadband speed race--for both DSL
and cable--began
in earnest.

Both cable and DSL still use traditional frequency signaling over copper wires,
but new breakthroughs are poised to go mainstream. Fiber
to the premises (FTTP) promises lightning-fast network speeds, and WiMax
will push broadband into territories that wires can't reach today. As for what
applications this next broadband revolution will bring--well, we have only begun
to imagine.

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