Editing Information appliance (section)

== Appliance vs computer ==
The term ''information appliance'' was coined by [[Jef Raskin]] around 1979.<ref>{{Cite book | author=Bergman, Eric | title=Information Appliances and Beyond (Interactive Technologies) | date=2000 | publisher=Morgan Kaufmann | isbn=1-55860-600-9 | pages=2–3 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=wtPlin2FNXMC&pg=PA3 | access-date=2008-05-06  }}</ref><ref>{{Cite book | author=Allan, Roy | title=A history of the personal computer: the people and the technology | year=2001 | publisher=Allan Pub. | location=London, Ont.  | isbn=0-9689108-0-7 | page=49 | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FLabRYnGrOcC&dq=computing+IT+appliance+date:1970-2005&pg=PA12 | access-date=2008-05-06  }}</ref> As later explained by [[Donald Norman]] in his influential ''The Invisible Computer'',<ref>{{Cite book | author=Norman, Donald A. | title=The invisible computer: why good products can fail, the personal computer is so complex, and information appliances are the solution | year=1998 | publisher=MIT Press | location=Cambridge, Massachusetts | isbn=0-262-64041-4 | url=https://archive.org/details/invisiblecompute00norm_0 }}</ref> the main characteristics of IA, as opposed to any normal [[computer]], were:
* designed and pre-configured for a single application (like a toaster appliance, which is designed only to make toast),
* so easy to use for untrained people, that it effectively becomes unnoticeable, "invisible" to them,
* able to automatically share information with any other IAs.

This definition of IA was different from today's. Jef Raskin initially tried to include such features in the [[Apple Macintosh]], which he designed, but eventually the project went a quite different way. For a short while during the mid- and late 1980s, there were a few models of simple electronic [[typewriter]]s with screens and some form of memory storage.  These dedicated [[word processor]] machines had some of the attributes of an information appliance, and Raskin designed one of them, the [[Canon Cat]]. He described some properties of his definition of information appliance in his book ''[[The Humane Interface]]''.

[[Larry Ellison]], [[Oracle Corporation]] CEO, predicted that information appliances and [[network computer]]s would supersede personal computers (PCs).<ref>{{Cite book | author=Walters, E. Garrison | title=The essential guide to computing | year=2001 | publisher=Prentice Hall PTR | location=Upper Saddle River, NJ  | isbn=0-13-019469-7 | page=[https://archive.org/details/essentialguideto00walt/page/13 13] | url=https://archive.org/details/essentialguideto00walt  | url-access=registration | quote=information network desktop computer IT appliance 1970-2005. | access-date=2008-05-06 }}</ref>