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Should PC's be more like pencils? So argued Larry Ellison in 1996, touting his new product, the Network Computer (NC). Computers should be smaller, faster, and cheaper, to spread their market beyond the level of those that could afford $1,000+ PC's.

This invention, the Oracle CEO claimed, would change forever the computer industry: no longer would desktops take up a whole desktop, laptops a whole lap.

Instead, the nifty NC would be a light, small machine that stored most of its data on a centralized network, rather than on a local hard drive. The NC would update itself automatically, and be as simple to use as a telephone.

Like Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems with his vision of Java based network computing, the motivation underlying Ellison's hope for the NC was surely to usurp Microsoft from its dominant position in the industry, by utilizing the revolutionary power of the network to act as a central server for thin clients, making obsolete 'Wintel' machines that stored everything locally.

That was 1996. And today, most of the world still uses 'Wintel' machines of the type abhorred by Ellison; the Network Computer, in the form proposed by Oracle, did not take off.

Of course, there has been a proliferation of increasingly mobile devices connected to networks: WAP phones, PDA's, lighter laptops. Yet there is still nothing that truly matches Ellison's provocative yet so far unrealized vision, computing with the hard part taken out.

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