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...apparently, is everyone else. "It isn't just about games," Goldman says of TEN. "It's about creating a place, a club." TEN will offer E-mail, live text chat and bulletin boards; Mpath boasts software that lets players speak to friends and foes while they're playing. Eventually, say online developers, such features could even supplant the games themselves, spawning software genres that take advantage of the Internet's capacity for intense social interaction. They envision games that look less like cartoon carnage and more like movies in which the audience writes the script...
Certain key shortcomings doomed the PDAs to failure. The handwriting recognition on these early models was atrocious, with Gary Trudeau lampooning in his "Doonesbury" strip the Newton's inability to recognize text. Secondly, devices like the Newton were too big and bulky to be of any use. Early PDAs were as big as a paperback novel and almost as heavy. They could be transported, but weren't truly portable in any sense of the word. They also required expensive add-ons to connect to desktop computers. At up to $1,000 a pop, these devices were no small investment...
...Pilot is almost all screen; input is done with a stylus on its touch-sensitive screen. Unlike the painful full-text recognition of the Newton, the Pilot uses the Grafitti alphabet, which has you enter data letter by letter using special keystrokes. It takes a few hours to learn how to make each letter of the alphabet, but you can easily be writing at 20 words per minute within an afternoon. The Pilot literally took the market by storm as a little guy: it's about the size of an index card, weighs only six ounces and gets several weeks...
After gluing these book pages on 15-foot sheets of linen, participants come up with creative images stemming from the text and paint them on the pages, Rollins said...
...computers sent him a piece of E-mail. If this had been the movies, the message would have been presaged by something dramatic--the woo-ga sound of a submarine diving into combat, say. But of course it wasn't. This was a line of dry text automatically generated by one of the machines that guard his network. It said simply, "The mail servers are down." The alert told Rosen that his 6,000 clients were now unable to receive E-mail...