Blue Tooth and Your Apple IIgs

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GS WorldView Editor Notes:

READ THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE - When this becomes a reality, the ability to
connect these to your Apple IIgs will also be developed.  Think about that
for some powerful world-wide communication network potentials when using your
Apple IIgs in the future.

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Blue Tooth promises to put a computer network into everyone's pockets

By James Coates Chicago Tribune

As president and chief operating officer of computer-networking giant 3Com
Corp., Bruce Claflin makes an unlikely prophet as he waves his Star Trek-style
Palm VII handheld Internet communicator in the air and touts the coming wonders
of Blue Tooth.

Blue Tooth, explained Claflin, is the code name for a master plan to do nothing
less than put a full-blown computer network into the pockets, handbags and
briefcases of everybody in America.

``I know you hear a lot of promises about great big changes that are coming, but
when we start putting a computer network in your pocket, that definitely is
going to be a big development,'' Claflin said.

As the latest in the dizzying series of technological developments that have
accompanied the Internet revolution, the Blue Tooth program focuses on letting
people access Web sites, e-mail, news wires and such by using mobile wireless
devices rather than the more familiar desktop and laptop computers now used for
Internet browsing.

Virtually every heavyweight in the computer-telecommunications game is signed on
to Blue Tooth: IBM, Toshiba, Ericsson, Nokia, Puma Technology and, of course,
3Com.

As manufacturers implement Blue Tooth standards, they promise product lines that
include cell phones capable of browsing Web sites, pagers that can display video
clips and voice messages, as well as television remote-control boxes that
display alternative channels in one or more tiny screens above the channel
buttons.

Until now, Claflin noted, the biggest stumbling block to filling humanity's
homes and pockets with such futuristic and empowering devices has been the
difficulty of getting different devices ``to talk to each other.''

Although a pager might be able to receive by radio waves the small amounts of
data needed to display a phone number, there was no way to use the pager to
respond to calls, or to get more complex types of information such as lengthy
news reports and other documents into it.

Likewise, a cell phone can connect to a broadcasting tower and carry voice
transmissions but cannot send or receive the specialized bits of data called IP
(Internet Protocol) packets that make e-mail and the World Wide Web possible.

Named for the dentally challenged 10th-century Viking king who unified the
warring tribes that became Denmark, Blue Tooth is a hot new computer-industry
drive to create a set of manufacturing standards to unify the warring knots of
digital devices that now are becoming commonplace.

In bold strokes, Blue Tooth is the way that fast-converging computer and
telecommunications companies plan to turn each person's personal space into yet
another node on the Internet.

Michael Dertouzos, chief of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, used the
term ``bodynet'' in his 1997 book ``What Will Be'' to describe the idea of
connecting portable networked devices to the Internet.

``Your bodynet will let you make phone calls, check your e-mail, watch TV and
pay your bills as you walk down the street,'' Dertouzos forecasted.

Today, the Palm VII is just one of many devices that permits everything except
television on one's body.

Blue Tooth amounts to a set of agreed-to protocols, much as is the case with the
standardized codes that make the Internet itself possible. The new
personal-gadget standards include how to set radio frequencies so that devices
being used by one person won't conflict with devices being used by a neighbor.

Other issues include the size of each bit of data being sent or received by each
device and how such devices identify themselves to the Internet as a whole and
to the various computer networks they might use.

Already, Claflin boasted, using such standards lets the $500 wireless Palm VII
download Web sites in the back seat of a taxi or a corporate conference room or
any place in New York, Chicago and many other locales.

The original Palm devices were designed as handheld computers that let people
carry address books and other databases, run a wide variety of business and
personal programs, and even download e-mail from a desktop computer for reading
and responding while traveling.

Now, in Palm VII, it has added a short radio antenna that allows modest but
effective Internet access. The device includes software that strips the content
of Web sites down to the essentials and then formats the information for the
tiny 2-inch by 4-inch Palm screen.

In one fell swoop, the little gadget is capable of acquiring breaking news, and
not only reading stock quotes, but allowing the user to buy and sell shares over
Internet brokerage sites.

Just June 18, 3Com and Aether Technologies, a provider of wireless data
integration services, formed a new company, OpenSky, to deliver wireless data to
Palms and other devices.

OpenSky said it will provide a single-source solution for billing, content,
customer support and integration of services that allows users to securely
access their primary e-mail address, extract information from the Internet and
corporate intranets and share their schedules remotely through any handheld
computer, pager or wireless application protocol-enabled phone.

The company hopes to be up and running by the end of this year. Meanwhile, the
data for Web sites is beamed into the Palm VII by the digital telephone network
operated by Bell South for its RIM data network.

Bell South offers its own Internet service over the network in the form of
pager-size e-mail devices that come with tiny but full-featured keyboards. RIM
and Palm VII are, at least in the minds of their ardent boosters, mere
forerunners of things to come.

Soon, Claflin promised, Blue Tooth means the Palm VIII will arrive and it will
be part of a full-blown computer network that people will carry about on their
persons. In addition to having the Internet features of the Palm VII, the VIII
model will be able to communicate with other devices that a user might be
carrying. Those other devices, in turn, would ``talk to'' one another, creating
the equivalent of a tiny computer network.

This up-close-and-personal network will consist of components like cell phones,
digital pagers and personal digital assistants in users' pockets, backpacks and
other nearby devices. (EDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM)

Although such a collection of gadgets sounds like the symptoms of a seriously
overserved gadget buff, Blue Tooth proponents counter there are major physical
aspects to using technology that make a personal network desirable for ordinary
people, as well as the gadget-obsessed.

The most commonly cited use is when somebody is using a cell phone and then
needs to retrieve a number from the phone's address book while still on the
line.

As things stand now, the person has to tell the other party to hang up so that
he can look at the phone's address book and then call back with the number.

With a second device equipped with Blue Tooth personal networking, the phone
user can look up a number and even pass it along with other data to the other
person by beaming data from the address book to the cell phone and then to the
receiving party.

At that end, the data would be sent from the cell phone to another pocket-size
device such as a Palm. In this fashion people could transmit all sorts of
documents and even video and sounds over cell-phone networks.

But to make it work, the devices that each person uses must be networked
together.

Using weak radio signals that don't carry beyond a few feet, Blue Tooth
technology allows relatively high-speed data transmission between mobile devices
and any computers that might be nearby.

And thanks to breakthroughs in digital-telephone transmission, each of these
tiny Blue Tooth one-person networks can be connected to the Internet and the
network running at one's office.

For example, phone company Sprint PCS sealed a deal in June with the Yahoo!
Internet portal site to provide special data and e-mail service to be accessed
by customers using Sprint PCS digital phones.

Those digital phones will act as the primary Internet link for the personal
networks envisioned by Blue Tooth strategists.

Made possible only now that digital telephone networks have become as widespread
as traditional analog cell phones, the Blue Tooth program has become one of the
hottest developments on the Internet scene as companies scramble to exploit it.

The Blue Tooth initiative, led by Microsoft Corp. and Intel Corp., comes in the
form of a standard that will use a variety of the same Internet Protocol that
runs the entire Internet in a miniature version that connects handheld and other
mobile devices using weak radio waves.

Blue Tooth, Claflin noted, is key to such hot new ideas as Schaumburg-based
Motorola's efforts to create a network in alliance with partners, including Sun
Microsystems Inc., that will allow wireless access to the Internet for
pedestrians or motorists.

Earlier in June, Motorola took its first step toward becoming a major player in
this new area of personal Internet connections by joining with 3Com's networking
archrival, Cisco Systems Inc., in acquiring Germany's Robert Bosch Group, a
provider of high-speed Internet access by broadcasting data over the air.

Blue Tooth, Claflin explained, will let people tap into such wireless Internet
networks with a wide variety of devices they carry on their person or in their
automobiles.

For 3Com and Cisco, the major strategy focuses not on supplying the low-cost
gadgets like the Palms that people carry, but the huge numbers of switches,
routers and wireless receivers that will create the networks that will make the
portable devices work.

3Com, perhaps best known for paying to change the name of San Francisco's
Candlestick Park to 3Com Park, badly needs the sort of invigoration that Blue
Tooth could bring if the public buys into the idea of each person becoming a
computer network.

The company's revenues have become flat for a number of reasons, including
changes in the once highly lucrative PC-modem business as manufacturers started
building the devices into computers, attacking the add-on market
California-based 3Com enjoyed after buying Skokie-based U.S. Robotics Inc., the
world's largest modem-maker, in 1997.

The new strategy focuses on 3Com's product line of equipment needed behind the
scenes to operate Internet networks, Internet service providers and, of course,
wireless networks that will talk to Blue Tooth gadgets.

In a sense, devices like the Palm VII and those to follow it are like the famous
business model that Gillette created to essentially give away razors because the
company's real business was selling razor blades.

Only with Blue Tooth, the idea is to give away the razor blades (like the
relatively cheap Palm devices) in order to sell the big multimillion-dollar
wireless-ready networks needed to serve them.

``Our goal,'' said Claflin, ``is to make the network totally invisible to those
who use it. People will just know that things they carry around or use at home
or work do stuff that helps them be productive and enjoy life.

``And,'' he added, ``when that happens, 3Com benefits in a big way because we
are supplying the equipment that works behind the scenes to make that invisible
network work.''

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(c) 1999, Chicago Tribune. 

Used with premission - 7/14/99 - Editor GS WorldView

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