COMPUTING NEEDS A REVOLUTIONARY APPROACH
by Frank Bajak

The way we compute is wrong-headed. Commercial software is on the whole poorly designed, ugly and counterintuitive. It doesn't leverage even a fraction of the tremendous computing power now available.

All the while, we fight a rising data tide with the crude tools of pre-computer era office clerks ­ sorting e-mails, text and image files into virtual folders. We waste hours organizing and searching for data.

The PC was supposed to free us from such drudgery.

This is David Gelernter talking; a Yale University computer scientist with serious credentials ­ painter, author, artificial intelligence theorist, Unabomber victim.

The brilliant computer design innovations of the 1970s ­ born at Apple and Xerox and mass-marketed by Microsoft ­ were stale by the time the Web came along, Gelernter posits. The current prevailing "Windows-Menu-Mouse" model is maddeningly obsolete.

Computing desperately needs a revolution ­ a paradigm shift ­ because we all really want to organize data more organically, like the mind does, says Gelernter. And we want that information easily available to us wherever we go.

That's the idea, at least, behind a new program called Scopeware co-invented by Gelernter. It proposes to fundamentally alter how we compute.

"It always seemed to me that the most natural way to organize your electronic life would be the way you organize your real life, moment by moment," says the 46-year-old Gelernter, whose 1980s programming efforts were among the first to enable multiple computers to work together on a single problem.

Gelernter's renown as a guru of computing aesthetics drew him the nearly fatal attention of Theodore Kaczynski. In June 1993, a bomb nearly killed Gelernter as he opened mail in his office.

Ten months later, Gelernter sketched out in a Washington Post article what would initially be called "Lifestreams" ­ software intended to wean users from file-and-folder dependency and let them organize data as if in "an electronic diary or journal or scrapbook."

"I don't want to save bits of paper any more, nor computer disks nor videotapes, nor do I wish to care about whether my home computer is compatible with my office computer, or about any other such boring and preposterous compatibility questions ..." wrote Gelernter. "I want my life to be perfectly organized, and I want to spend no time whatsoever organizing it."

In a telephone interview, Gelernter explained the software, which evolved from a Yale doctoral thesis he suggested to co-patent holder Eric Freeman, now director of engineering at Walt Disney Internet Group.

"Each new everything that entered my life would just be stuck on the end of a time-ordered stream," Gelernter said. "The question, 'Where did I put that thing?' would always be answered because the answer would be on that stream."

A person's lifestream would originate with their birth certificate, include wedding pictures, bills, bank statements, vacation video ­ and extend into future appointments. And everything would be immediately accessible ­ viewable chronologically in defined time frames and searchable by keyword, project, sender.

Too good to be true? Gelernter doesn't think so, though it's too early to say how the market will receive it. Scopeware was launched last month by Mirror Worlds Technologies Inc, a 35-person startup with some $8 million in seed money of which he is chief scientist.

Gelernter is absolutely evangelical about the product: "I'm tuned to the thing all day, every day. It's what's on my screen right now. It's on all my screens, at home and at the office."

And the beauty of it is that the stream of cascading index cards on his screen ­ each representing a unique piece of e-mail, a Web page, spreadsheet, fax, whatever ­ is updated constantly as new items arrive addressed to him or generated by colleagues who authorize Scopeware to share the items with him.

This is so-called peer-to-peer computing in practice.

Mirror Worlds, based in New York and New Haven, Conn., is targeting Scopeware at the corporate world. Perhaps its strongest easily explainable selling point is its ability to manage scanned images, an area where established competitors include ZyIMAGE from ZyLAB International.

But Scopeware's real power within an organization, as demonstrated by Mirror Worlds' chief executive, Michael Satow, is its ability to let a user make information instantly available to whichever co-workers the information's creator desires.

"This actually gives us a very nice window into unstructured information. It is more that just a search engine and the interface is very attractive," says Phyllis Michaelides, chief technical officer of Textron, which makes Bell helicopters and Cessna planes.

Michaelides was easily persuaded to test Scopeware. She has been a Gelernter fan since his 1991 book, "Mirror Worlds", which describes a networked future akin to the current Internet on steroids ­ where information is not static, like a Web page, but dynamic and constantly evolving.

Scopeware would have been impractical until very recently.

It is heavy-duty, network-based software.

Unlike other programs designed to make disparate data manageable such as Onespace from Enfish Technology Inc, Scopeware runs on a server to which users' computers are linked via a local access network or the Internet. That makes its footprint light on a user's computer, where it runs inside a Web browser independent of operating systems.

The program runs on Windows NT or Windows 2000 servers. Mirror Worlds will also do custom installations on Linux and Sun Solaris servers. It is priced on a per-user basis, starting at $2,200 for 10 users and about $19,000 for 100 users.

Scopeware doesn't pretend to try to displace such corporate stalwarts as Lotus Notes, though Gelernter says it could. Nor does it compete with Microsoft or other manufacturer's mail and personal information management programs.

It is built to coexist with what people currently use, said Satow, a former Securities and Exchange Commission attorney who cut his entrepreneurial teeth on Market XT, the first retail after-hours securities trading service, selling it for $100 million to Tradescape.com early last year.

Scopeware creates a data reservoir of virtual index cards that link users to the original files, wherever on the network they may reside. Run the mouse cursor over a card and a thumbnail image, with a summary of the file's contents, appears on-screen. An add-on module makes a user's stream available on WAP-enabled cellular phones and handheld computers running the Palm operating system.

All that computing overhead concerns Marty Gruhn, vice president of the technology research firm Summit Strategies. Gruhn has not yet seen Scopeware and wondered about its demands.

"You know I've looked at a few of these products and what I found is that their overhead would kill you," she said.

On the other hand, said Gruhn, "if you think about it, it's really a concept whose time has come. Now that the vast majority of people know how to use a computer it seems logical that (the file-folder) metaphor isn't needed anymore."

Gruhn is like most computer power-users.

She wants a "little cataloguing fairy" to logically organize all her files and place them in a searchable stream. "There is a massive latent demand for this and success will go to the guy who figures out how to do it first."