About this site & contact

The original owner of the domain digitalwire.com was a company called Digital Wire Consulting GmbH that I founded in 1995 in Zurich (Switzerland). It was one of the first ISP/web companies in Switzerland. The company went out of business in 2002 but I retained the domain name just in case I wanted to start something again.

I’ve been fascinated with computers since the early 1980’s when I started to write my first ‘BASIC’ programs. What followed was a series of excursions into all sorts of programming languages, computers and operating systems.

I’ve been a keen follower of Internet technology either through my own ventures or out of sheer interest. But only recently (around 2007ish) have I started again to pay more attention to the computing landscape, as I believe we have entered a new era – the era of ubiquitous computing (aka. the fourth industrial revolution)

This is evident in the rapid change of how we define computers and computing. Smart devices of different forms and types are rapidly arriving in the market at prices that would have been unthinkable. But other factors contribute as well, for example, new generations use computers as if they existed forever – they grew up with this tool and have transformed the computing experience for all of us.

Not since the 1980’s has there been so much innovation in such a short time span. Moore’s law had been upheld all this time, but only recently has it really started to make impact in how we use computers on a very large scale.

Urs Gubser

Comments

The case for central bank digital currency as public infrastructure to enable digital assets

I have dabbled a fair amount with all sorts of crypto currencies and their respective permissionless networks. In fact, I have been dabbling since 2012 which is by my last count a whopping 12 years. While I have always maintained that I do believe the general concept for digitization and programmability of assets is on the right path, its implementation, the user experience, the accessibility, the fraudulent activities, and the overall inefficiencies permissionless DLTs have, never made me into a true believer. I have stated that opinion on several occasions, here , here and here . There are still barriers to entry when it comes to digitization of assets: sustainable- and interoperable infrastructure. To illustrate this, I recently asked a notary public here in Zurich, why they can’t store the notarized documents as PDFs, the answer surprised me: because they must keep records for at least 70 years. Now, think about what would have happened if we stored these documents on floppy disks...

Apples Vision Pro Headset strategy is all about its Arm-chips.

Apple has given us a vision of what their VR and AR future might entail. But as have others pointed out numerous times, the whole point of the showcase at the WWDC 23 was to let people experiment, I’ve heard others say that it’s like the launch of the Apple Watch when Apple didn’t really know what would become of it. This is similar and yet different. Just like the Apple Watch (and the iPad before it), Apple sought to porting its whole ecosystem onto a watch – granted, the Apple Watch can’t live on its own and a better comparison would probably be the iPad. The iPad can live without any other Apple device and unlike the iPhone, never really had a clearly defined function other than to watch movies and browse the web. It was not until it gained the ability to be used with a pencil that artists and designers started to explore the potential. I’m trying to point out that Apple took 5 years from the first iPad in 2010 to the iPad Pro with pencil in 2015 to find its “kille...

Will smart phone cameras be better than digital mirrorless cameras?

If you believe Terushi Shimizu or rather, the way the press is formulating it , then camera phones will have better image quality in 2024 than your trusty DSLR or mirrorless digital camera. He backs this up with sensor technology advancements and computational photography. He has a point. However, as a digital camera enthusiast myself, I must strongly disagree with this point of view. The message might be interpreted in such way that its meaning reflects a view that we are no longer bound by physics to get the best image quality. The thing is this, the bigger your camera sensor, the more photons it can capture. However, this comes at the realization that big sensors require big lenses which in turn makes the camera big and heavy. I’m simplifying of course, but that’s physics. For camera makers it is therefore always a question of tradeoffs: do you want better image quality or do you want a smaller and lighter camera. Camera phones or cameras in smartph...

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