Chairman of IBM, Thomas J. Watson has been famously misquoted for his alleged 1943 statement: “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”

Three of these would fill all of Britain’s needs according to Cambridge mathematician Professor Douglas Hartree who said: All the calculations ever needed in this country could be done on the three digital computers which are (in 1951) being built – one in Cambridge, one in Teddington, and one in Manchester. No-one else will ever need machines of their own, or will be able to afford to buy them.

If both of those luminaries were correct, I’ve owned and thrown away at least twice the world’s total supply of computers, each time wincing at the technological marvels no-one wants any more.

Turbo 264
El Gato, here, are makers of TV and video capture devices which made Macs “Home Entertainment Centres” long before the name was invented. Their latest gadget, the Turbo 264, is basically a hardwired, one-solution computer that does exactly what it says: compress video to H264 in turbo time. It usually takes longer to compress video than it does to view it, so anything helping the process is bound to be a winner. Especially when it’s just a cheap(ish) USB plug and play device.

If manufacturers follow El Gato and produce a lot more, single-function, plug and play devices, it could ease the way for simple computers such as laptops, gaining the sort of power reserved for far more sophisticated machines. We are used to plugging in our cameras, phones, media card readers, whatever, along with printers, scanners, external disk drives, speakers and so on. Why not have little boxes plugged in on demand to accomplish one task or process, instead of relying on increasingly powerful CPU’s and expensive software for the same?

It would go a long way to eliminating software piracy and be cross-platform because the devices are completely self-contained. Flash ROMs and web-based interfaces solve any updating necessary in exactly the same way modem manufacturers have been using for years. The gadgets themselves can be bought as needed rather than paying out in advance for more expensive computers, often with capabilities never used. Then disposing of them as the computers become obsolete.