The really annoying thing from my point of view is that I had that idea in about 1994, but didn't know who to take it to and couldn't have afforded to do anything with it anyway

Actually, my idea was a little more complete, since I was thinking of a lowish frequency as an inductive power coupling for charging purposes, and a much higher frequency on top of it as a very short range high bandwidth comms layer. The idea was that one could have a device which was like a very powerful PDA with lots of storage, which when dropped on the pad became effectively a desktop machine. IE the video card, monitor, keyboard, mouse, networking, sound, etc were in a base station with a standardised interface, and the portable unit was the storage (which after all is the core of any machine when you get right down to it).

One could forget about lugging an entire machine around, just have a pocket-sized databank with enough OS and CPU to be used for PDA-like purposes, but enough storage to hold all your work, data, applications, etc. At home or at work, drop it on the standard IO console interface and instant PC.

Rob would remember this, we talked about the idea extensively when we were supposed to be working.

Oh well. Perhaps one day, when I'm rich

pca