The term
information appliance was coined by
Jef Raskin around 1979. As later explained by
Donald Norman in his influential
The Invisible Computer, the main characteristics of IA, as opposed to any normal
computer, were: • designed and pre-configured for a single application (like a toaster appliance, which is designed only to make toast), • so easy to use for untrained people, that it effectively becomes unnoticeable, "invisible" to them, • able to automatically share information with any other IAs. This definition of IA was different from today's. Jef Raskin initially tried to include such features in the
Apple Macintosh, which he designed, but eventually the project went a quite different way. For a short while during the mid- and late 1980s, there were a few models of simple electronic
typewriters with screens and some form of memory storage. These dedicated
word processor machines had some of the attributes of an information appliance, and Raskin designed one of them, the
Canon Cat. He described some properties of his definition of information appliance in his book
The Humane Interface.
Larry Ellison,
Oracle Corporation CEO, predicted that information appliances and
network computers would supersede personal computers (PCs). == See also ==