Back in the early 1990s personal computing faced a crisis.

The power of the computer had exceeded the needs of most tasks. The answer, it was felt, was to keep more than one task up at a time, to "multitask." (The piece to the left is called "The Multitasking Queen," by Beverly Naidus. You can find it, and several other interesting artworks by the same artist, here, and some background on the installation at Washington University in St. Louis here.)

It took time for software to catch up to this but it did happen.

And now hardware has the same need.

We're accustomed to thinking of chips as doing one thing. You have processors, memory chips, radio chips, communication processors. You have graphic chips and application chips.

But by combining several related functions onto one product, printer makers found new life building "multi-function" products that could fax, print, scan and copy. Why not define all that functionality as one chip?

Processor makers learned long-ago how inefficient it was to keep memory on separate chips, and so "cache" memory holds data as it waits for processing.

By taking this lesson to heart, chip makers are reaching toward a new growth spurt. I hesitate to call it a boom, because true booms are based on doing something new, and we're not talking here about something new, more like something borrowed.

But it's an important concept to Always-On. When you can combine, say, a sensor and a radio, you have a single-chip medical device that is manufactured at the chip plant. The same thing happens when combine communications and a camera's workings. Make every chip that lives in the world an 802.11 client, and the chip-maker has a new growth market, while you as a systems vendor have many new applications.

Suddenly there's a real motive toward making that wireless access point a platform, with a modular, scalable, PC operating system. The wireless network is no longer the end of the road. It's no longer a cul de sac. Like many modern suburbs, it too becomes the city. And it should be planned-for the way suburbs should be planned, with growth assumed, and plenty of lanes for new traffic.