First, safety. Radiation screens are available, and have been for some years. Most of them place an

Emissions barrier between you and the front of your display, while others encase the entire monitor,

Protecting you from side and

Io rear emissions as well. Many offices already have these screens available for their workers.

The paperless office is still

15 a dream, but the basic tools are in place. We receive mail in two basic forms: on paper in an envelope, or electronically on our

Computers. Most of us have access to e-mail in one form

Or another. That's half the battle won. The other half is a bit more difficult, but it can

Be, and is being, done. All mail can be opened in the mail room and scanned into the computer using optical character recognitnn 'OCR).

Then a document-image­processing program takes over and lets you accomplish electronically what you

Would normally do with

Paper. Various personal computer products are available for this purpose.

Pen-based computing is

coming into its own. Pen-

A() input capabilities are beginning to show up in hardware, applications, and operating systems. You can't take notes that will go

Directly into your computer, and the technology wouldn't know what to do with your doodles, but it would know that a doodle isn't a valid

Word. And that's a start — a good one.

Multimedia really needs no explanation. There are many packages that help you

Create multimedia

Presentations, and the tools to create customized multimedia training programs are also plentiful.

So CD-ROM disks, such as Ziff­Davis's Computer Select and

Microsoft's Bookshelf, let you access mountains of information with ease.

65 Computers are already

Much smaller than they used to be, and you can't go to an industry show these days without finding some

70 company promoting its 'small footprint'. When you start talking about laptops, notebooks, and palmtops, the question becomes, 'How

75 small is too small?' FAX capabilities are already available on boards that you can plug into your computer. When you combine the

So technologies present in internal modems with voice recognition, the basics for having your computer replace your phone-voice

85 line are in place.

Voice recognition is another technology that may appear limited in its present form, but it shows great

So promise for the future.

Current voice-recognition systems can handle speaker-dependent continuous speech or speaker-

Independent discrete speech.

Speaking to your computer will be a major factor in the office of the future. In some locations, it is already a

loo major factor in the office of today. Stock is traded in some brokerage houses by verbal command from the broker to the computer. So,

You ask your computer a question, and it answers you — verbally. Depending on the rate of speech sampling used and the resolution the A/D

Converter uses for each

Sample, we can already create a credible approximation of human speech with digitized

115 sound.

Large display screens? You can get screens of up to 35 inches now, and between Barco and Mitsubishi

120 competing for the honor of having the largest monitor, it's hard to predict just how big they will get in the future. As for color, some

125 companies offer upwards of 16 million. Somewhere in that number must lie the perfect color for reducing eye-strain.

130 The real disaster that most

Of us still have to deal with is

The traditional keyboard, which is the cause of much

Pain and suffering in the

135 form of carpal tunnel syndrome and other

Repetitive-strain injuries. Wrist rests are available to alleviate the problem, and

New designs for strange-looking keyboards,Star Trek-style, are moving from the drawing board to the factory.

Enterprise networks are

145 proliferating almost as fast as LANs did just a year or two ago. Public data

Networks are ripe for the dialling up and signing on.

150 And the Internet already