Computers have evolved over the years, from the Antikythera used by the ancient Greeks to study planetary movements, to good old Abacus’, use of punch cards to ENIAC’s, micro computers and main frames to the modern PC that we use today including the various variants like handhelds, laptops, tablets, video game consoles and not to forget the super computers.

It’s been quite a journey, but what will it look like a few thousand or maybe just a hundred years down the lane, long after we are all gone. This is what I envision how my life might look like. There is this device called “brain wave codec”, which I always carry with me. Authentication is through a combination of my DNA (saliva) and a password that I just have to think. I can command the device through thought. The brain waves (electrical signals emitted from the brain) are decoded to analyze my thoughts and convert them into a universal intermediate language which every other device can understand. I wake up in the morning and I need to know what’s happening in the world, maybe catch up with the daily headlines and check out how India did in yesterday’s cricket match, So I just think about it, the codec converts my thoughts and sends the commands out to the web (yeah, its all wireless duh..). The web returns back a bunch of stuff that I am interested in, Its been studying my interests for a while now. The codec then converts it back to something my senses could use, like voice or text or just feed it directly to my brain so I just know what happened. Based on my mood, the kitchen is sent commands to prepare whatever breakfast I want. At work, I will be writing cool user friendly software that shows and analyze users thinking patterns that could be used by businesses to build wonderful applications. During weekends, I would want to go shopping with wife to this new mall, Yeah, I don’t think this will change in a thousand years. So, we sit in our car, the car now already knows about this and it would take us to this new place. We shop around for stuff and pick my things from the shop and just walk out. The checkout system knows who we are and so it just deducts what it needs from my bank balance. We decide to have dinner outside in a Thai restaurant. I think about what the best Thai restaurants are around this new place, I immediately get results from the web and decide to go to one in the list, my car then just drives me there. On the way we pull up the menu and place an order, all through thought. Yeah, even though we can telepathy, we usually just talk. The table and food are ready when we reach there, so we have a good time and leave the place and head back home, a few dollars less.

I have heard many interesting stories of how companies come up with their names. Here’s a pretty exhaustive list of etymologies. My favorite one:

Apple — for the favourite fruit of co-founder Steve Jobs and/or for the time he worked at an apple orchard. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call the company Apple Computer if his colleagues didn’t suggest a better name by 5 p.m. Apple wanted to distance itself from the cold, unapproachable, complicated imagery created by other computer companies at the time — which had names such as IBM, DEC, Cincom and Tesseract — in order to get people to use them at home. They looked for a name that supported a brand positioning strategy that was to be perceived as simple, warm, human, approachable and different. Note: Apple had to get approval from the Beatle’s Apple Corps to use the name ‘Apple’ and paid a one-time royalty of $100,000 to McIntosh Laboratory, Inc., a maker of high-end audio equipment, to use the derivative name ‘Macintosh’ (’Mac’).