Let me share with you my vision of Hardware Categories.
To start with, it came to me once, that the rest of the [non-geekish] world has some pain determinig what can be done with a specific piece of IT hardware and what could not.
"Scanners, printers, faxes" may be easy to understand by the word of it, but "hard drives"?
"Flash" memory? RAM? CPU? GPU? NIC?
Multifunction copiers with secure printing and storage?
Heck, even that bluetooth spy stone for MI6 spy info exchange they found in Moscow http://www.bellona.org/english_import_area/international/russia/envirorights/info_access/41703
All those geek names are a hindrance for plain consumers.
And this only makes it hard for them to consume...
So what if we (the Industry) solve this problem by clearly categorizing all the existing hardware SKUs and put them into one or many categories,
clearly and unambiguosly indicating what that hardware does to the information flow?
I suggest they would go like these:
A - for Accumulating info
D - for Displaying info (making info sensible to us humans)
P - for Processing (modifying, encrypting, computing) info
S - for Sensing info (making it available to the hardware)
T - for Transferring info.
Let me show you some examples.
So, the whole PC does ADPST.
Printers do D (belongs to "D" hardware class).
Network card, routers do T.
Scanners do S.
Cryptocards, CPUs, FPUs do P.
Copiers do SD.
Faxes do SDT.
Telephones do T (belong to "T" hardware class).
Multifunction copiers with ability to store jobs on hard drive, send faxes and print do ADST.
Now, in order to see what you can do with a new device that is being marketed now, all you have to do is see it's hardware class descriptor.
Doesn't this make life easier?
Tell me what do you think.
