The mobile computing industry will never really take off until one key element currently missing is in place, believes Dr Gerald Popek, chairman of Inglewood, California-based Locus Computing Corp and a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles’s School of Computer Science: giving the keynote at the 1993 Usenix Symposium on Mobile & Location-Independent Computing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he posited the need for what he calls Transparent Virtual Networking, noting that So far, mobility-enabled hardware has resulted in lots of people trying to take their office environment with them when they travel, with results that are less than spectacular; Mobile computing needs to work much like virtual memory does today in most systems, transparently to the user except for the significant increase in power that it affords; he reckons software technology of the future must make the sometimes connected computer operate in the same manner and effectiveness in mobile operation as it does when on the organisation’s information network – and one key to this is dramatic improvement in the capabilities of standard file systems in use today, particularly in the areas of optimistic replication, sophisticated predictive cacheing, and transparent synchronisation on reconnection with conflict resolution; the US National Science Foundation made a grant to Locus to investigate the issues presented by small mobile computers and it will submit the results later this year.
