JON SEVERN

No, life's really not that bad

Somebody complained to me recently that they had sent me an email and it had bounced. These things happen from time to time (we are not living in a perfect world, in case you hadn't noticed), so I swore at my PC and checked a few things, but without expecting to find much wrong. Cursing the PC is, I expect, a common worktime activity for most readers of this magazine, although cursing the toaster, car, and countless inanimate and animate objects is probably high on the list of pastimes outside of work.

The trouble with PCs is that they are just so damn clever these days. Think back ten years (what were you doing in 1992?) and consider what PCs were capable of doing then. Office-based applications such as word processing and spreadsheet packages were performing more-or-less the same function as they do now, but connectivity was nowhere near as good, and there was a much more limited range of software applications available. And it was quite unusual to come across a PC on the factory floor.

One of the reasons why PCs have taken off is their openness, something which is close to the heart of this magazine. The openness has allowed vast numbers of hardware and software developers to create innovative solutions to a variety of problems.

Looking around an imaginary state-of-the-art factory today we might find industrial PCs in the form of workstations with integral touchscreens, perhaps built into a panel or pendant control for a machine or process. More industrialised PCs might be found in the form of box PCs, hidden away in 19-inch racks, with no keyboard or monitor permanently connected. Yet more PCs might be found with a Windows CE operating system running on solid-state hardware with no moving parts, while other solid-state PCs might be using the componentised Windows XP Embedded OS. These smaller PCs with less power and memory (by today's PC standards) might be linked to a powerful office-based server via a thin client architecture. And let's not forget that a state-of-the-art factory will still have offices, so there will be numerous desktop and laptop PCs being used to play battleships and solitaire.

Thanks to modern communications technologies (and, of course, battery technologies) portable PCs are also moving into the factory environment. In particular, solid-state portable PCs or web pads are far more suitable than devices with moving parts for environments where shock and vibration are commonplace (ever witnessed the 'dead cat' bounce of a conventional laptop?).

Clearly the PC family is growing, with different classes of PC available to suit the diverse requirements found around the factory and offices. For example, office-based ERP systems rely on receiving data from the shop floor, but PLCs are not as good at handling data as they are at controlling processes - so PCs need to be out there on the shopfloor as well as in the offices. But the point is, the PC family members will all work together because they all share the same genes. In turn, this means that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Our imaginary factory is only state-of-the-art, not utopian, so there will still be accountants. Luckily for us, however, the real cost of computing power has plummeted. Aside from rapid developments that have increased PC power by orders of magnitude, as the volumes of hard drives, memory and processor chips has grown, the costs have been driven down. So industrial PCs, which often use conventional components in clever resilient mountings, have benefited hugely and the cost of an entry-level industrial PC is lower than might be expected.

Our desktop or laptop may not always be our best friend, but let's celebrate the benefits that openness has brought us all and find something other than PCs to curse. Now then, are there any accountants reading this?