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Jody entered the computer lab in the Center for Students With Disabilities at NTC pushing a cart. "I have your computer Alan ." she says as she begins to set it up on the table. Alan helps plug in the cables, and as he is about to turn it on, she exclaims "I forgot the monitor!" "Don't worry about it, you can get it later" he replies, and a speaker announces "Accent ready." when he snaps on the power. "What do I need a monitor for?" he asks in a very matter-of-fact tone, and begins restoring from backup diskettes to the newly replaced hard drive; his synthesizer reporting his progress.

Just down the hall, in another room, Jeff sits in his wheelchair with a small boom microphone at the corner of his mouth. No sooner does he utter the phrase "open-word- perfect" and there it is on the screen before him. "begin- business-letter"; a new document opens, the inside address is inserted at the top and he begins dictating a letter to his rehabilitation counselor asking for help in purchasing this equipment. He spell checks and prints the letter completely by voice; needing assistance only to turn on the computer, put his headset on, and mail the letter -- Too bad his counselor didn't have an e-mail address.

I am not making any of this up. I have seen these things, and many more the like. It's happening every day, here in Wausau, Wisconsin and around the world; disabled people and those interested in assisting them are beta-testing some of the newest and most innovative technologies. These people don't compute the way that they do because they want to; they do it because they have to. If it was easy, everybody would be doing it.

Imagine for a minute that we could walk up to the computer and tell it to "open-netscape", and it would load and welcome you back "good morning, since you've been gone you've received the following e-mail:" Sound like si-fi? If you could have Star Trek like conversational interaction with your computer, would you use it? You would of course still have a mouse, a keyboard, and a monitor, but you wouldn't always need them, and almost everyone would have access in one way or another.

These systems are very CPU, and memory intensive; often fighting for resources with the very applications they are attempting to control, or monitor. Particularly voice recognition, which has always demanded very high-end machines. The next generation processor chip promises big increases in processing power, but applications, and my guess is that the operating systems as well will need to be written for it in order to take advantage of it's benefits. These new computers are to be marketed as " eye candy " with video like you've never seen before. A pretty picture can get someone's attention, but how long can you hold it?

Instead of, or in addition to specialized video chips make specialized voice I/O chips and build voice I/O right into the operating system. Even those AT&T commercials could become reality if talking to your computer from the shower were possible. make these tools easy enough for almost anyone to use, and almost everyone will use them. I believe that who ever comes out with the first voice interactive operating system (VIOS), that is easy to learn and effortless to use, will corner the market -- And I'll settle for only 1% of the first year's gross.

Sell it to the "mind," not just the "eyeball."

Amended December 5, 1996

The heading on their page; "When you absolutely need to talk to your computer and have it talk back!" seems to be along the same lines as "These people don't compute the way that they do because they want to; they do it because they have to." I consider this to be a prototype -- A truly extraordinary prototype -- of the operating system of the future that I spoke of above. Using Verbal-Ease as a model, create an operating system to bring us into the next millennium.