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You can live like Bill Gates!

By Richard Morochove

First published April 9, 1998

ORLANDO, Florida - Parents, do you ever wish your child could grow up just like Bill Gates? Your wish may have already come true!

No, that's not a junk mail come-on from a cyber publishing clearing house. It's what Bill Gates is selling these days.

"Today the only population you could say that lives a Web lifestyle is probably students on university campuses," said Gates in his keynote presentation at WinHEC (Windows Hardware Engineering Conference), held here late last month.

"I may also fit that category, given that I've got a 45-megabit connection to my house and reasonable flat-panel displays in every room of my house. I have to say, at least based on my experience, the Web lifestyle is a fun thing, something that we should try to make affordable and reasonable for everyone." 

It sounds like fun to me, too. But I should note there are also a few differences between the lifestyle of Gates and the typical university student. He lives in accommodations slightly more luxurious than the average dorm room and has a bank balance with a few more figures before the decimal point.

Of course, Gates is selling futures here, hyping what's just around the corner. He's determined to put more exciting material on the Internet and Chrome is how he's going to do it.

Chrome is the code-name for an upcoming Windows enhancement that allows developers to create great looking multimedia content on the Web, CD and DVD. It works through simple XML (eXtensible Markup Language) statements that create animations you can download from the Web in a fraction of a second. I admit I was impressed by the demos I saw. The biggest downside: Chrome works best with the heavy-duty processing power of a Pentium II processor.

Many hardware makers displayed prototypes at WinHEC that will make it to market by the end of this year or early in 1999.

Some of the more interesting developments are on the video front. Gates showed off a dazzling PC-based home video editing system. It lets you decode two digital video signals simultaneously and mix them together to create home movies with better than VHS resolution.

The key is the new 2Real chip from C-Cube Microsystems that can both encode and decode MPEG2 video, simultaneously if necessary. It records at resolutions up to 720 by 480 at 30 frames per second.

You can play back video from one or two consumer DVD video players, add transitions or other special effects, then encode it and store it on the hard drive. Then you run a program to convert it to DVD video format and burn it into a disc in a DVR unit inside the PC. You can record up to one hour of MPEG2 compressed video in one gigabyte of storage.

Microsoft says a system with this level of functionality would have cost about $100,000 a year ago. It will be available in a few months at a price that's affordable to the home video buff.

According to Microsoft's research, more than 35 per cent of the inexpensive home PCs sold last holiday season were purchased by families who already owned at least one PC and did not buy it to replace an older computer. If you have a growing number of multi-PC families, some will want to link everything together.

To satisfy this need, NEC Electronics showed its prototype of a home multimedia network that joins personal computers with entertainment devices. The Termboy family (my 2 bits says it gets renamed) of devices on display connected several PCs to a DVD drive, graphics printer, digital camera and digital television set.

To handle the transmission of all this multimedia content, the Termboy network uses the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) 1394 standard for high speed communications, formerly known as FireWire. It operates at blazing speeds of up to 200 Mbps, 20 times as fast as many of today's office networks.

Computer Design magazine predicts the IEEE 1394 standard will become tomorrow's version of the RCA jack, the ubiquitous device that connects today's stereo components. The magazine says it will inspire a whole new wave of products and applications.

To control the Termboy network you can mount a nifty infrared device, that operates at distances up to 6.5 meters, high in a corner of a room. Between rooms, you use plastic optical fiber, good for distances of up to 70 meters. Repeater boxes are available for longer cable runs.

According to Patrick Yu, NEC System Application Engineering Manager, prototypes will be distributed to interested manufacturers as early as this June. NEC will also manufacture its own units for sale to consumers early in 1999. Sony is developing a similar network. CW

Richard Morochove, FCA, is a Toronto-based computer consultant.

Copyright ©1998 by Morochove & Associates Inc. All rights reserved. This work may not be copied or distributed by any means without our prior written permission.

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