Ten years from now, the computer as we know it today will be an anachronism, a device consigned to museums, dumpsters and garages. Instead, according to Gartner analysts, the digital information and services once delivered via conventional computers will be available through almost everything we touch-—kiosks, airplane seats, newspapers and a broad array of new devices.

At the heart of this next generation of computing is the network. It will be pervasive and personal, and you'll pay for the services that you consume, said Gartner Fellow Tom Austin during the analyst firm's Symposium/ITxpo 2004.

The amount of information, delivered by billions if not trillions of RFID sensors, or smart dust, functioning as self-organizing and managed networks, will explode, requiring an event-driven model that Gartner calls a "tera" architecture. "A tera architecture must be capable of processing terabytes of data every second," Austin said. The tera architecture combination of smart sensor networks and an event-driven data will be common in five years and pervasive within 10 years.

However, managing a world with sensors scattered about like grains of sand will require a new class of operating system that can auto-discover and organize networks, Austin said. The TinyOS, for example, is designed for very small networked sensors running low power CPUs with a few kilobytes of RAM.

In the future, sensor networks will transform businesses and supply chains, ranging from healthcare to transportation. For example, today RFID is used to track cargo on container ships, but over time sensors could be embedded in every object, monitoring temperature, vibration, spoilage and other factors that could determine the pricing of food or manufactured goods as they move from transport to warehouse to store shelves.

However, Gartner might be a little aggressive in its predictions for the maturing of RFID. Wal-Mart has been a major proponent of RFID, but its rollout of sensor tags across its supply chain has been hit by delays and logistical problems. The cultural and organizational issues will be as formidable as the technology challenges.

Austin said that the tipping point for the intelligent networks will be the availability of smaller, cheaper sensors, as well as two new breakthrough networking technologies: ultrawideband and WiMax (802.16). Ultrawideband creates a fast wireless connection that consumes about 10^-4 the power of a cell phone, and WiMax promises 70 megabits per second across a 30-mile range.

Gartner analysts predicted that by 2015, passive tags would begin to inhabit every non-trivial object, and every thing could be identifiable and located. Active, intelligent wireless networking and sensing devices will cost less than 50 cents. The sensors would run low power CPUs, have wireless and sensor chips, ad hoc networking algorithms, and gain power from the electromagnetic spectrum. In addition, the majority of computers will be invisible and disposable.

Of course, the challenge will be in turning all that data into useful information and resolving the privacy issues that accompany pervasive networked computing. Even today, transforming terabytes of customer data into actionable information is not well understood.

Mark Raskino, a research vice president at Gartner, said that businesses need to anticipate customer needs and preferences by analyzing the huge numbers of detailed interactions from conventional data and massive sensor networks that will be prevalent by the end of the decade.

He gave a basic example of how Yahoo correlates the data of searches for movie information into forecasts of new movie sales, achieving better than 95 percent accuracy. Companies will be making investments in software to extract analytic value from social networks and to turn the information issued by sensors and other data sources into a precision management science, Raskino said.

Looking out a decade or two, every person and thing could be instrumented with sensors that feed data into the cloud and, based on polices and inferred rules, take actions on behalf of the "client."

"All of us are part of a massive data trail that never gets deleted and gets backed up," said Gartner analyst Andy Kyte. "The battle is forming over who gets to use my data, for what purposes and under what circumstance." Companies have to invest in trust to gain customer loyalty. "As a business, your customer has to trust you to do the right thing," Kyte said. "In the connected world you can fool all the people once, and that's it. Networks have very long memories."

One of the best known case studies of such a faux pas happened earlier this decade when DigitalConvergence began distributing a scanner called the CueCat that was designed to tie printed documents to the Web. Among the company's missteps was its failure to adequately disclose to users that the devices were calling home with usage data considered by many to be a violation of privacy. After the Privacy Foundation became aware of the potential breach in trust, it issued a report that identified and criticized the behavior. Today, DigitalConvergence is out of business and all that's left of the company are some patents and a Web page that says "DigitalConvergence had a colossal dream."

The privacy issue will prove to be the most daunting challenge in bringing about the fully connected world.

You can write to me at dan.farber@cnet.com. If you're looking for my commentaries on other IT topics, check the archives.