PCs are taking over the world. Just about everyone I know either owns or has access to a personal computer of some sort, and those of us that use a PC regularly soon come to depend on it. We use them to write letters, send and receive email and faxes, browse the web and plan dives using decompression planning software.
Many hard boat skippers have PCs by the helm of their boats, displaying electronic charts, plotting the boat's position from a GPS interface and even steering the boat's auto-pilot.
A PC is a remarkable general purpose tool which can be used to fulfil many special purpose roles. How did those of us now dependant on a PC ever cope without them?
Back in the days before cheap and readily available PCs we used special to purpose tools. To send and receive faxes we had fax machines. To write letters we had word processors, typewriters and even just a simple pen and paper. Rather than search the divernet.com web site we had to paw through piles of back copies by hand to find that vaguely remembered article about the wreck we would be diving at the weekend.
The move from special to purpose tools to a general purpose computer open to many applications is not a unique phenomenon. It is a cycle that has repeated many times in the history of computers.
The earliest computers were special to purpose machines built for specific applications such as plotting gun trajectories, coding messages and breaking codes. Breaking codes was one of the landmarks, because that is where computers first began to evolve into more general purpose machines.
Even so, as room-sized general purpose computers became available, they were still sold as tools for specific applications such as running a businesses accounts or payroll, the hardware and software being purchased bundled together from the computer manufacturer.
A far cry from the current situation where you buy a PC from any one of hundreds of suppliers, an operating system from another supplier (and there is a choice, even if most of us end up with Microsoft), and a huge variety of applications are available from thousands of suppliers.
As history has repeated itself many times, imagine the future if this pattern was repeated with dive computers.
Using the PC as an analogy, our current dive computers are at about the same level of sophistication and flexibility as typewriters. Some dive computers are a little more sophisticated, but only to the level of a primitive word processor compared to a basic typewriter. Specific tools for a specific and limited application. Fine for writing letters, but only if all we want to do is write letters by the process that the creators of the typewriter has preconceived and constrained us to work by.
Dive computers are overdue for the next evolutionary step, from that of special purpose decompression calculator to a general purpose underwater computer which can be loaded with applications for decompression and a host of other useful things.
This could come about as a development from existing dive computer suppliers, opening up their hardware to third party software applications, but why waste time with hardware specific to diving? Palm sized personal computers or personal digital assistants (PDAs) are compact and readily available. All we need is an underwater housing and a pressure sensor to measure depth. We would then have a mature platform with all the economies of mass market hardware, ready for some enterprising diver to write a dive computer application.
Using a palm computer as the basis for a dive computer also has the advantage of standardised interfaces. You could start with a basic computer and housing to run decompression software, then grow the system with more advanced hardware and software to match the way your diving develops.
Some obvious ideas such as cylinder pressure display and oxygen monitoring for a rebreather have already been integrated into the more advanced of our current dive computers, all be it in a limited way. But why stop there? The dive computer could actually control the rebreather.
Add an interface to a positioning system for navigation. Link this to the equivalent of a chart plotter and you could follow a digital wreck tour downloaded from divernet.com. Take pictures with a digital camera and transfer them to the computer and to be stored against their location on the wreck.
Back on the boat, plug in to a mobile phone and transfer the dive to your web site, or even transfer the dive as it happens using an interface to the underwater mobile phone that a French company recently developed. Decompression stop boredom would be relieved by Laura Croft and the latest underwater tomb raider.
Some will argue that the convenience and economy of our current special to purpose dive computers will ensure their continued survival and general purpose underwater PCs could only ever be a niche market. Some people used to say that typewriters would never be replaced by PCs running word processor software. After all, who needs the complexity of a PC just to write a letter? Who would want to spend hundreds of pounds on a PC and printer when you could buy a cheap typewriter for little more than a hundred pounds?
Visit your local office superstore. How many typewriters and special to purpose word processors are on the shelves? And how many shelves display PCs and applications software? Many PC owners only ever use them to write letters, but how many would go back to a simple typewriter?
Some of my more fanciful uses of my underwater computer may seem far fetched, but there is nothing revolutionary about any of them. All are based on technology that is currently available.
All it needs to get things moving is a housing for a palm computer. Many of us would only ever use the basic dive computer software, but the underwater equivalent of typewriters could soon be obsolete.