| Living on the leading edge is nothing new for Laursen. It's been home to him since he was a kid. In 1972, when he was in eighth grade, Laursen was writing FORTRAN programs at school that would run off-site on a district computer. Laursen went on to Michigan State and AT&T Bell Labs, where he worked on the fault-tolerant technologies that are now part of Veritas Software Corp.
Laursen was one of the original designers of the kernel for Oracle6, the first database to take advantage of multiple processors with shared memory. He went on to manage the lower half of the kernel development for Oracle's parallel server. When
Ellison asked him to produce a digital video server, Laursen pumped out a prototype in two months. "The point is to hide all of this from the users," he says.
Laursen believes Unwired Planet will do that. "Everyone carries a cell phone these days. They are
used to it," he says. With the addition of software, a user can type in a stock ticker number and get quotes, type in a city and get weather or press a button and talk to an agent. "That kind of immediate access to data, that is network computing," he says.
When it comes to predicting the future, Laursen's biggest concern is the network quality. "I'm not predicting global network meltdown, but I think the quality will get worse before it gets better. I think there will be some challenges. We're already seeing that on the Internet. The packet loss is pretty significant on the Internet and there are bottlenecks as people move things like voice from running over proprietary but highly structured scalable networks to more standard networks. We'll see some quality degradation in voice and data, and some carriers will differenti
ate themselves on the basis of better quality of service."
Contribution Past 12 Months:Turning the concept of a network computer into reality.
Next 12 Months: Improving the interface, scalability and features of Unwired Planet's software/language for wireless Internet/intranet access.
Millennium Forecast: The masses will use cell phones for wireless data and Internet/intranet access.
Millennium Disturbance: Network quality will get worse before it gets better. Car: A 1991 Ford Explorer
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