But, because most people think of servers as mysterious boxes, located in dark basements and cranking out stuff for everyone else, I thought making it into a web server was particularly dramatic. It is connected to the Internet through a parallel port and runs a simplified version of Linux, a popular version of the Unix operating system. The Stanford web server is one of the first projects of a new Wearables Lab started by Pratt to develop computer technology that can be incorporated directly into clothing. The lab is modeled after an older and larger one at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The user could see what the computer is doing by putting on and plugging in special glasses that double as a computer display.
Several companies sell such glasses.
The most serious obstacle to producing a truly wearable computer is the lack of a compact method for inputting data. Pratt and doctoral student Greg Defouw are developing a special glove that can recognize a digital sign language called Thumbcode, which they have developed. Stanford's Wearables Lab is already working on a more powerful server based on an Intel Pentium chipset. Researchers plan to combine a credit card-size Pentium motherboard from Cell Computing with a new 340 MB hard drive from IBM that is a fraction of an inch thick and less than 2 inches on a side. The previous record for the world's smallest web server belonged to Phar Lap Software, whose custom computer is 3.6 inches by 3.8 inches by 1 inch.