Date: Tue, 10 Dec 1996 03:36:40 GMT Server: NCSA/1.4.2 Content-type: text/html Mobile Computing at the University of Washington

Mobile Computing at the University of Washington

Over the next few years, powerful computing devices the size of contemporary calculators will become ubiquitous in the office and home environments. Systems such as the HP-100 palmtop and the Apple Newton represent the state-of-the art in autonomous mobile devices. These machines, while offering substantial storage capacity and computing power, have only limited communication capabilities. As a result, they do not enable users to access the powerful computing infrastructure that has been developed over the last 20 years.

In this project, we are exploring the design of system and application software for high-powered, highly-connected mobile devices. Our model is that mobile networks based on radio and infrared (IR) will soon offer bandwidth comparable to today's Ethernet. With this, will come the challenge of writing and using applications that are capable of adapting to rapid changes in location, and working with a broad range of computing devices having small screens and novel input devices.

Our goal is to provide an application programming environment that frees the programmer from concerns about location, connectivity, bandwidth, screen size, and style of input device. We envision that people will operate in our building-wide mobile network by running a combination of high-powered complex applications written by experts, and simple custom tools built by themselves. By analogy, people today use a small set of core programs, such as emacs, latex, and mosaic, in combination with personal programs based on custom shell scripts and little languages such as awk. We are exploiting several technologies to achieve this goal:

Contacts:


Marc E. Fiuczynski
Last updated Mon Apr 18 16:35:49 PDT 1994