This coming October will mark my 24th year at Creative Strategies and long time readers of my columns have often noted in emails and when I have met them over the years that some of my columns and analyses are often futuristic. That can be good as well as bad.
Good in that it gives people glimpses of the future, but bad in the sense that it whets their appetite for technology that may or may not ever make it to the market.
One such column is the one I wrote back in the summer of 1988 in Microscope, (a UK based publication that I have written for since 1985) on what I then called a PC in my pocket. The concept came to me while I was doing a lot of traveling that year and started fantasizing about not needing to carry a laptop with me all the time when on the road. Of course, back then, laptops weighed a lot and had minimal battery power so while they did allow us to work on airplanes, they we clunky, big and sometimes unruly.
At that time, I played a game of “what if” or what if I made a portable hard drive the center of my PC experience. In this particular column, I imagined a day in which I could get on a plane and the seat in front of me would have a PC screen on it and when I turned over the passenger table, I would find a keyboard and a slot in which I could just put my hard drive in and this location would now be turned into my personal computer with all of my personal settings, documents, etc at my disposal. I also imagined going into my hotel room and finding a display and a PC shell where I could pop in my hard drive and it too would instantly become my personal computer. In these examples, the hard drive was in essence the heart and soul of my personal computer and all I had to do was plug it into various displays and shells and they would immediately become “my” PC.
Of course, I had not worked out a lot of the details back then, such as I/O issues as well as compatibility problems with systems, but regardless, I thought this idea would be cool.

Well, some 17 years later, it appears some researchers at IBM have come up with the same conceptual idea and are pursuing a design that is quite similar to the one I proposed in my column in 1988. Researchers at IBM are testing software that would let you carry your home or office PC around on an iPod or similar portable device so that it can run on any PC. This is an interesting approach since, unlike my idea where it was plugged into a shell, it in essence takes over the “soul” of the current PC with a kind of hard drive and software heart transplant. More importantly, this takes care of the multitude of I/O problems I had not thought through as well as a series of shell infrastructures that would need to be in place for my original idea to work. Called the SoulPad, it creates a virtual computer user environment that connects an iPod or portable HD based device via a USB port to any X86 based system and when the person disconnects the device from the host PC, it saves all the work to the device including browser cookies or other digital signatures that a PC keeps in its short term memory.
IBM researchers say that the SoulPad name comes for the concept of separating a PC into a body (processor, memory, keyboard, display) and a soul (data, applications, personal settings.)
IBM says that three technology trends make the SoulPad feasible; faster and cheaper portable storage devices; auto-configuring operating systems that can boot unknown hardware without a separate installation phase; and the emergence of virtual machine technology on a PC-class system.
IBM researchers conducted their initial test on a 60 gig iPod Photo using Knopix, a Linux software derivative, as an auto-configuration OS, VM Ware Workstation as the virtual machine monitor and an X 86 PC as the encrypted virtual machine.
The minimum requirements for the SoulPad are 6 gigabytes of space- 4 gig for the auto config OS and 2 gig for space to swap and store encrypted data.

From a practical standpoint, the user could attach the SoulPad to a lighter laptop and then switch back to a more powerful desktop when not traveling. A vertical market example would be for a field worker to connect their SoulPad to a tablet PC for on-site use and then into a desktop when they get back to their office.

Actually, I would challenge IBM further to try and make this work with something like my Treo 650. I have already used my Treo on the road as my sole access device to email and the Internet and having a small hard drive with all of my files and browser options would be another interesting way to lighten my load while on the road.

While this is still an IBM research experiment, they appear to already have interest from potential customers. I could easily see hard drive vendors who are caught in drastic price wars using this to help them differentiate their place in the market.

However, making this work seamlessly between PC’s will be a great challenge as well as getting people to really adopt this idea en mass. Once you understand what it does and its value, it could gain some user traction. But I see this as a pretty hard marketing task since it is difficult to explain. Yet, it is a concept that is clearly worth pursuing and perfecting since, at least in my case, anything that lightens my travel load would be very welcome.