Wave Systems Corp. (fka WAVXQ)

[Dabears4]

On deployment Blue

Back in 1997, when Microsoft first started working on securing the PC, they had a dream to create new ways to experience multimedia, such as the following:

° Combining the PC, television and the Internet to create compelling interactive television programming.

° Pushing multimedia-rich Internet content to consumers via broadcast networks which deliver and store data locally on the PC, reducing the Internet bandwidth bottleneck while improving the consumer's overall experience.

° Delivering new business models, such as subscription services for software, electronic periodicals, and news and entertainment delivery through a set of secure, billable and scalable data services.

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/1997/Jan97/BrCast.asp

They intended to do this by installing a one time programmable 32-bit ARM-RISC security processor into every "Broadcast PC".

http://www.eetimes.com/news/97/939news/tapsarm.html

Hollywood balked, first on the need for protected outputs, then on the need for more protection (like the "Next Generation Secure Computing Base"). It's six years later, and there is still no deployment. Although Valenti sounds optimistic about having a proto-type by mid-2005.

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3541259/

As the Netscape anti-trust case points out, IBM was "first Chair" in the development of the Broadcast PC when it first started. That's how the meter got involved in being integrated in the chip.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/longterm/microsoft/stories/1999/microsoft060999.htm
http://www.wave.com/news/press_archive/97/971217ibm.html

IBM dropped first chair at some point and HP stepped in (thankfully). Don't know why Wave picked up the banner from there and developed it into their current "trusted computing" effort, but I am glad they did.

Bottom-line, it just takes time.