Electric motors are a good example of a pervasive technology.
The average American home contains about two dozen or more electric motors. However, because those motors are buried in consumer appliances like vacuum cleaners, electric toothbrushes, washing machines, and VCRs, we have trouble identifying all of them, and we don't know or care how many are inside each appliance. In the next generation, the same will be true for computers, most of which will be hidden in information appliances. The key inflection point is the one about the beginning of this decade in which making the devices small had finally led to the ability to specialize them according to their function in sufficient volume that they could be priced for mass markets. The architected open interface between the requesters of and providers of services, the so-called clients and servers, is the enabling transition for computing technology to become pervasive within the next decade.