Laursen, who left Oracle last spring after more than decade, is now putting his own spin on an NC ball. As vice president of engineering at Unwired Planet, he's the technological leader for a new software platform and language product being used by AT&T to bring wireless Internet and intranet access via smart phones and Cellular Digital Packet Data.

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