Flash drives turn any computer 'personal'

"The next time you go to install software that's going to be locked to the hard drive, your first reaction is going to be `Man, I want this on my U3 so I can have this anywhere,'" said Kate Purmal, U3's CEO.

The only big missing element for now is Microsoft Corp. software.

Although its popular productivity programs such as Excel or Word are common on office PCs, traveling workers still might not find the programs on a home or public computer.

So the ability to launch Microsoft software from a flash drive could be a big help. Microsoft and USB companies are still discussing potential licensing arrangements. (MSNBC is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.)

In the meantime, though, several new devices are emerging to take advantage of this shift in computer use.

For example, by tweaking the tiny processor in its flash drives to enable copyright protections, SanDisk created a drive called the Cruzer Freedom that lets students download reams of educational materials when they plug the device into a PC. Because each drive has a particular numeric identifier, teachers can put assignments and materials online that are accessible only to members of their classes.

That enabled Eastside Prep's new flash-drive project in Washington. Mark Bach, who heads the upper school and teaches at Eastside, plans to use the drives to disseminate primary source documents and other materials he's gathered for a unit on regional history.

As the drives' memory expands even further in coming years, he expects to augment the text with video.

"It becomes very, very malleable, and very creative on the part of the teacher, because the teacher can go beyond textbooks," he said.

For the business world, startup Realm Systems Inc. soon plans to roll out its own USB-based "mobile personal servers," with several gigabytes of memory for a few hundred dollars a pop, that could be plugged into any PC to let mobile employees do their computer-related work.

The Realm device will have a fingerprint reader to restrict access. It also clears its tracks from the host PC for privacy.

Of course, any portable storage device with significant memory, whether it's a "smart" cell phone, a digital assistant or an MP3 music player with a miniature hard drive, can do this trick of making any computer personal. That's more reason to believe the PC will soon fade into the background.

International Business Machines Corp. researcher Chandra Narayanaswami offers a good illustration of how we'll know it's happened:

When you check into an average hotel room and find — alongside the alarm clock, hair dryer and DVD player that once were bring-your-own items but now are as standard as the furniture — a cheap PC for guests to plug into, as our truly personal computing environment travels with us.

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