Taking My Morning Paper Digital

Home Office Computing, Dec, 1999 by John Dickinson

About seven or eight years ago, I was involved in a project at MIT's Media Lab, a place where some of the best computer scientists in the world conjure up new ways to apply digital technology to media problems.

One idea kicking around the lab at the time was that people like you and me should be able to read the morning newspaper using an electronic screen linked wirelessly to a network--the image was of an independent device with no messy cable connections that could spill your coffee. At the time, I thought the idea was sort of out there, but I also liked it a lot. After all, newspapers are messy--they're big and often stain your fingers with black ink.

So, when I recently looked at the performance parameters of Proxim's bridge that connects an Ethernet network to its Symphony wireless home network, my mind got to churning about implementing the Media Lab's idea. First, I got hold of the Proxim hardware, then called Gateway to see if I could borrow a Solo 5100 notebook for a couple of weeks. Proxim makes a PC Card that lets Symphony talk to a laptop, and the 5100 has a big 14-inch screen that could make the online editions of The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times legible.

I hooked it all up pretty easily, and found the online newspapers to be quite readable. As far out as the concept was a few years back, it's reality now. The Symphony network offers throughput speeds (about 800Kbps) that are faster than my SDSL Internet connection (384Kbps), which means the Solo connected to the Web looks like any other computer on my Ethernet LAN. The only exception is if I save a large file over to another computer because I'm used to file transfer rates of 10Mbps. But even though the wireless part of the connection doesn't go all the way to the Internet, a toast to Nick and the gang at MIT for at least getting the idea--and me--this far.