Surviving in a fast, nomadic world [mobile computing and communication]

Summary form only given, as follows. Most of us are nomads in that we travel from place to place with a wild array of laptops, PDA's, cellular telephones, pagers, etc. We desire to have the same computing environment, services and system support in those locations as we have in our corporate offices. Indeed we desire "anywhere, anytime" connectivity. Unfortunately, as soon as we leave the comfort of our corporate environment and head out on the road, we lose all the basic capabilities we enjoy in that environment. Indeed, we often encounter the frustration of weak (or no) connectivity, tiny keyboards, lack of interoperability, loss of backup, foreign environments, and inadequate support in general. We discuss how our computing and communications technology has brought us to this point, some of the open issues that must be addressed as we seek to develop the system support necessary to provide a rich set of capabilities and services to these nomads in a transparent and convenient form, and where we see this is likely to evolve in the future. We also discuss some of the emerging solutions to the problems raised by this revolution in the use of information technology.