High Tech: computers and gadgets in 1994

[Music] foreign [Music] it wasn't that long ago that if you had talked about virtual reality or modems or faxes or CD-ROMs people would have looked at you as if you just landed from Mars but now technology has invaded every corner of our lives used to be if you wanted a phone number you looked in a Rolodex now you can carry around a portable electronic Rolodex yeah or have your home computer store phone numbers and even dial the phone for you if you wanted to find out about say Teddy Roosevelt you used to look in the

encyclopedia now with CD-ROM on your computer there's Teddy himself with pictures and words and if you always wrote your appointments down in a book now there's the personal digital assistant or PDA like Apple's Newton it has a pager to receive data it gets messages from the office and more four times a day I get daily updates on World News sports news entertainment business news it recognizes your handwriting it even sends faxes will it go get coffee or pick up lunch for you uh no but it does have an alarm and it will wake you up

I could actually Circle this or if I wanted to go into dates and what about all the changes in home entertainment remember these eight tracks Obsolete and for you younger members of the audience this is called a record go to a record store these days can you find any records hmm records you mean the black things with the holes in the middle actually they have a few records for dance clubs and mobile DJs but CDs have just about replaced the record and they're about to replace cassettes as well I would say within the next two

years cassettes be back there with your eight tracks and now you can get movies on five inch CDs with features that allow you to select any part of the movie you want the Ryan briefing sure gone this is no longer a research project San Diego is a frequent test market for the very latest in home electronics more and more manufacturers around the world are coming to San Diego because of the demographics that we have here and just the nature of the market itself we got a sneak preview of starsight it'll come out this fall an

on-screen TV program guide it gives program listings and summaries it also lists shows by themes movies news comedies Sports if you're a basketball fan you want to see what's on what basketball games you're on sure I go to sports I go down to basketball and here are all the basketball related programs this will eventually be included in some TV sets and VCRs when you buy them and things we're already familiar with are getting smaller three inch color TV screen and a combination TV set and VCR that fits in your hand of course we're all familiar

with portable cellular phones you've all seen phones like this but did you ever think they'd get this small camcorders are smaller and now you can use them with your computers the computer Graphics are overlaid on the live video on the camera you want a small computer well you've heard of laptops this is a palm top a little hard to type on but it does a lot almost anything you can use a regular PC for other than maybe big Graphics programs you could do on this and if you think you have the very latest in computers

just wait a little a computer that you buy today will likely be obsolete six months from now and there's not a dang thing that you can do about it keeping up is hard to do [Music] it's the wave of the future and San Diego is riding the wave San Diego is becoming a high-tech and software Center there are close to 200 software development companies here and virtual reality has become an actual reality virtual reality is where you're immersed in a computer-generated environment virtual reality was displayed at the San Diego Electronics Show for entertainment value but

it has more practical applications in architecture where you could actually walk through buildings before they're built you can have it in medicine where you could have virtual surgery medical students for instance could practice on a virtual patient rather than an actual patient Kaiser Electro Optics of Carlsbad makes the headset Angel Studios of Carlsbad did the animation whoa just slammed into a door didn't even hurt San Diego has been a test market for interactive television Daniel's Cablevision has been offering a service that lets you tell your TV what you want to see at any given moment

news movie reviews financial information it has games you play against other people on the system and you can go shopping or pay your bills as for home Computers San Diego is one of the most computer literate areas in the country and we see it all here multimedia is the hot item now CD-ROMs like cinemania which not only have movie reviews and pictures but actual scenes from movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid would you make a jump like that you didn't have to it's the sort of thing that you really can't do any other

way you can have a book of movie reviews and a book of movie Stills and so on but to put it all together like this is really unique to to multimedia computing [Laughter] the San Diego Zoo has a CD-ROM choose an animal and watch we're here for it to make their day better and there are the online services computer bulletin boards where you can converse with people you've never met or seen now if you just figured out how to program your VCR all this technology can be a bit too much the non-technical person can get

overwhelmed oh that happened years ago that happened years ago we're overwhelmed by it The Future Has Arrived open the pod bay doors Hal I'm sorry Dave I'm afraid I can't do that in 2001 there was a talking computer named Hell in 1994 there's a computer that talks to hell or anyone else welcome to Macintosh thank you the Apple Mac Quadra responds to voice commands or questions computer what time is it 12 47 and 14 seconds that's right computer open calculator if it's all a bit much some advice from the experts learn about computers before you

buy one the wrong thing to do is just go out and buy a computer and then learn about it you'll learn but you'll learn a lot of things that maybe you didn't want to learn the technology is not getting easier it's getting more complicated there is hope and the power and the things you can do with the computer today are so much better that ultimately it's worth it and on the horizon talk of 500 channels on your TV video movies on demand information super highways with everything at your fingertips here it comes ready or not