Wires, cables and power cords

I had big computer hardware problems this week (unreliability is working overtime), so I had to pull my desktop machine out from under the desk to repair it. Here is the scene that greeted me after I removed it:



You can't help but notice the wires - the huge jumble of wires leading to and from the computer. Why are there so many wires? Here's an inventory of the wires and cables hooking to my desktop machine:

1. The computer's power cord
   
2. keyboard cable
   
3. mouse cable
   
4. Power cord for monitor #1
   
5. VGA cable for monitor #1
   
6. Power cord for monitor #2
   
7. VGA cable for monitor #2
   
8. Wire to the speakers
   
9. Power cord for the speakers
   
10. Wire from the microphone
    
11. Four firewire cables for the four firewire drives
    
12. Four power cords for the four firewire drives
    
13. 100-base-T network cable
    
14. Cable TV cable (with splitter - one side of the splitter plugs into cable modem, the other into the tuner card in the computer)
    
15. Power cord for the cable modem
    
16. Cord from the cable modem to the hub/router
    
17. Power cord for the hub/router
    
18. USB cable for the digital camera (custom plug goes into Leigh's camera)
    
19. USB cable for MP3 players (with the small plug on the other end)
    
20. USB cable for the USB hub
    
21. Power brick/cable for the USB hub's power
    
22. USB cable to the memory card reader (handles David's and Irena's cameras)
    
23. USB cable for PDA cradle
    
24. Power brick/cord for PDA
    
25. USB cable for the scanner
    
26. power cord for the scanner
    
27. USB cable for the inkjet photo printer
    
28. Power cord for the photo printer
    
29. USB cable to the web cam
    
30. SVideo cable out from the TV tuner card
    
31. Sound cable out from the TV tuner card
    
32. Video and sound cables in from the XBox (Feeds into TV tuner card so I don't need a TV in my office to hook to the XBox)
    
33. Parallel printer cable to laser printer
    
34. Power cord for the laser printer
    
35. Special Firewire cable for the video camera
    
36. Three power cords for the three UPSs
    
37. Power cord for the power strip
    
38. Probably a couple odds and ends that I am missing

If you add it all up, you can see that there are nearly 50 different cords and cables floating around under my desk, and that doesn't count the recharger for my cell phone, the recharger for the video camera, the generic battery recharger, their power strips, etc.

Let's just agree right now that this goes beyond sad - it is insane. 50 cords and cables is an insane thing to have under your desk.

Here's the dream, and how things will probably evolve over the next 10 to 20 years:

• You buy a new printer and set it in the room.
  
• It gets its power wirelessly through some sort of induction relationship with the wall
  
• It connects to the computer wirelessly through a high-speed wireless network in the room.

No drivers, no configuration. It just does exactly what you expect without any effort of any sort on your part.

As you think about it more, however, you realize that all of this collapses and vanishes over the next couple of decades. It is inevitable that the "desktop computer" shrinks into a tablet-like device that you carry with you (or, ideally, that you carry inside you via Vertebrane). There is no paper, so the printers and scanners go away. There are no firewire drives because we access unlimited storage space on the internet's successor via the high-speed wireless network that exists everywhere around us. There are no UPSs because everything is running off of batteries that last for months or years. And so on.

In other words, our grandkids will look at the photo at the beginning of this post and they will laugh and laugh and laugh...