Wasting no time, the gang of four companies that only a couple of weeks ago pledged to make their internet, network computer and electronic commerce technologies interoperable – IBM Corp, Sun Microsystems Inc, Oracle Corps Network Computing Inc and Netscape Communications Corp (CI No 3,118) – will today stand up and agree to support a standard for storing details of users personal information, desktop and application environment on smart cards which plug into network computers. Instead of lugging around laptops or doing to do some fancy reconfiguration of someone elses system, the cards will plug into network computers supporting the standard that enables users to pull up their usual working environment locally. Sun has already created a Java Card API enabling smart card developers to write Java applications for their devices.
