In 1992 the Internet wasn’t available to the general public. There were no iPods or any other portable digital music players. Cellphones were big, bulky and analog, mainly used in cars in the U.S. The first consumer digital cameras had just arrived: crude models that cost $800, worked only in black and white, and held just 32 images.

Microsoft was offering the clumsy Windows 3.1, which seemed to crash if you sneezed, and many people were still using the geeky and limited DOS operating system on their “IBM-compatible” PCs. Apple’s technology was way ahead of Windows, but the company would soon enter a period of management mediocrity and product paralysis. And there were scores of PC makers in the U.S., most of them now defunct. The hottest one was Compaq, today a mere brand name for Hewlett-Packard. Dell was still an upstart.

Personal computers were typically sold without modems, networking ports or stereo sound. They had awful, limited color video, far short of what a cheap TV could produce. Too often their designers assumed PC buyers were techies or hobbyists, willing and able to perform complicated hardware and software upgrades and tweaks.

Then and now my main criteria for judging digital consumer products have been simplicity, ease of use and reliability — a sort of index for the burden on the user. And in 1992 most products failed miserably on that scale. They required far too much attention, knowledge and effort by users when theoretically they were supposed to do just the opposite — namely, to make their lives easier.

By around 2001, when the current major operating systems, Windows XP and Apple’s Mac OS X, made their debuts, personal technology had vastly improved. Many of the rough edges had been sanded off. The Mac had long been “plug and play,” and Windows was much closer to that goal. Both systems were fairly stable. The iPod arrived that year, and digital cameras and cell phones — by then well established and growing sleeker by the year — began a rapid evolution that added features and cut prices.

And by then the World Wide Web had changed everything. It had vastly enriched the experience of computing, adding information, entertainment, communication and commerce on a grand scale. Sure, too few people in America had real broadband or wireless networking by 2001, but the balance was getting better. The burden of use for personal computers and related gadgets was trending lower.

Enter the security crisis, which all but destroyed that welcome momentum. There had been viruses for many years, of course, including some big attacks in the 1990s. But over the past five years, the security problem has morphed into a major hassle for people who own and use Windows computers. Viruses and other malicious software programs are still with us, but now they’ve been joined by new categories of pernicious technologies, especially spyware, adware, and fake email and Web sites designed to steal your privacy, your money and even your identity. Spam has gone from a nuisance to a plague.

And the Internet, for all its numerous benefits, has become an engine for this digital onslaught. In the physical world, it isn’t hard to stay out of bad neighborhoods and avoid the company of crooks. But in cyberspace, it’s harder to read the signs — digital criminals, who range from vandals to organized thieves, mingle invisibly with the public in a world where everyone is easily connected.

Today, warding off the myriad threats online takes more and more time, money and effort than ever before. You have to run multiple security programs, interpret all their warnings and alerts, tell them what to do when they detect suspicious activity, and consistently update them. It’s a real hassle, one that seriously interferes with the productivity, and the pleasure, computers can and should provide.

In fact, the burden of using a Windows computer is higher now than it was in 2001. By contrast, Apple’s Macintosh is easier to use than ever, partly because it has so far remained free from viruses, spyware and adware — except for a few minor cases. After stagnating in the mid-’90s, Apple’s software and hardware are once again markedly superior to those of Windows PCs.

But even Mac users have to contend with spam and must learn to avoid fake Web sites designed to steal sensitive financial information. And users of both platforms must also contend with a welter of restrictions on the use of digital content such as music and videos.

So where are we heading?

I believe that in the future the Internet will become more like the electrical grid, a behind-the-scenes platform to which all manner of gadgets will be directly connected, each taking some power and intelligence from the network to perform its task. While personal computers won’t go away, they won’t be the main way to get online, or even needed as intermediaries by many devices. Whenever you watch TV or make a phone call, you’ll be on the Internet, though you won’t be browsing the Web in the manner you do on a PC. This will open up all sorts of new features and interactivity.

Even unlikely gadgets will be connected. Your microwave oven, for instance, will use the Internet to quietly download information that will allow it to recognize the bar codes or radio tags on packaged food products and cook them appropriately.

The star of this new world will be the cell phone — or, more accurately, the device formerly known as the cell phone. Already, some high-end phones, like Palm’s Treo, are essentially mini computers, complete with keyboards and expandable memory. They do many of the things for which people formerly required laptops.
These so-called smart phones can surf the Web, and send and receive e-mail and instant messages, at broadband speeds. They can take, display and edit photos and movies; download and play music, videos and TV shows; play ever more sophisticated games; and even view and edit Microsoft Office documents.

I expect these capabilities to be pushed down to phones that cost less. New competitors will enter the business of making phones and the software and services that run on them.

For these smart phones to flourish, however, they will have to get much simpler to use. The burden on the user will have to drop sharply. Complicated user interfaces will have to be replaced with better ones. Reliability must improve. And the stranglehold on innovation now imposed by all-powerful wireless carriers will have to be broken or loosened. Also, the security problems that plague the PC will have to be headed off somehow. Already, the digital criminals are trying to target cell phones.

But I remain optimistic. The digital revolution can’t be stopped, and the next 15 years should see as many exciting developments as the past 15 have.

And like the technologies themselves, digital jargon changes and expands all the time. Just when you thought you’d mastered stuff like RAM (computer memory) and GSM (the cellphone technology invented in Europe), new terms pop up like weeds on your lawn.

So here’s a quick and dirty glossary designed to make holiday shopping for the latest tech products feel less like taking the SATs.

Computers
Some of the newest terminology to know when you’re shopping for a computer, whether it be a Windows PC or an Apple Macintosh, involves the processor, the chip that’s the brain of the box. Until recently, most consumer computers had a single processor. Now it’s common to find them with so-called dual cores, which in effect means two processors packaged into one chip. Two cores won’t make your word processing or email go any faster, but they do potentially give you more horsepower for such heavy-duty tasks as gaming or video editing. I say “potentially,” because to make the most of a dual-core processor, you need software that sends some work to each core, and most programs are not yet designed to do that.

The labeling of these new processors is also confusing. Intel called its first consumer laptop dual-core chip the “Core Duo”; now there’s a second generation known as the “Core 2 Duo.” (In techland, apparently, the “2 Duo” moniker is assumed to be crystal clear.) And there are still some single-core Intel processors, dubbed “Core Solo.”

For laptops in general, one of the latest terms you’ll encounter is “ExpressCard,” which refers to the new version of that slot on the side of the machine into which you can pop a wireless receiver or some other add-on. For years these slots have adhered to a standard called “PC Card,” but the latest laptops are showing up with slots that follow the new ExpressCard standard. Worse yet for confused consumers, it comes in two flavors: a narrower one called ExpressCard/34, and a wider one called ExpressCard/54. And naturally, neither can accept cards designed for the older, PC Card standard.

Cellphones
One hardly knows where to begin when talking about cellphone jargon. But an obvious source of confusion is the baffling nomenclature being given to the various new high-speed cellphone networks that can transmit a wide assortment of material — music, video clips and web sites — to phones at speeds rivaling home broadband.

If you’re shopping for a phone at Verizon or Sprint, the high-speed capability is called “EVDO” or “EV-DO” (which stands for Evolution Data Only or Evolution Data Optimized). At Cingular, it’s known as “HSDPA” (for High-Speed Downlink Packet Access).

Since T-Mobile doesn’t have a network in this speed class, salespeople there will brag instead about “EDGE” (Enhanced Data Rates for Global Evolution), which, despite its aspirational name, is a much slower technology.

TV
Buying a television used to be simple. No more. There’s a whole new vocabulary for digital TV shopping. It’s too expansive to cover completely in this space, but here are a few select terms.

In addition to the familiar plasma and LCD (liquid crystal display) sets, which have an expensive digital panel at the front, there’s now a third type of screen, called a “microdisplay.” This is actually a rear-projection television, although much skinnier than the old behemoths. There are three main microdisplay types. Each uses a different sort of very small digital circuit in the rear of the set to generate the picture, which is then projected onto the large screen at the front. And naturally, each has its own jargony name. The first, called “DLP” (digital light processing), uses a special chip loaded with minuscule mirrors. The second, confusingly called “LCD,” uses a tiny LCD chip. The third, “LCoS” (liquid crystal on silicon), is sort of a hybrid of the other two, in that it uses both liquid crystals and mirrors.

And don’t forget the digital video recorder — the now almost mandatory add-on used to record and save programs on hard disks inside cable and satellite receivers or inside a stand-alone unit — which unfortunately goes by two names. Sometimes it’s called a “DVR” (digital video recorder) and sometimes a “PVR” (personal video recorder), but really, they’re the same thing. You might even hear the technology referred to as “TiVo,” which is actually the best-known brand of digital video recorder. Think of TiVo as the Kleenex of DVRs — its name is sometimes used as a generic term for the whole category.

Wireless
Wi-Fi wireless networks are now pretty familiar. Many people even know they come in two main speeds, designated by letters. The “b” variety, which was the first version to gain public acceptance, was succeeded by the “g” variety, which is faster and backwards-compatible with “b.”

Nice and simple, right? Not for long. Chaos has come to the Wi-Fi world in the form of a new standard,”n,” which is supposedly even faster than “g” and, more important, offers longer range. The problem is, the engineering committee that sets such standards has been taking forever to certify “n,” so companies have begun selling Wi-Fi gear that purports to use the “n” standard in some form but may not be compatible with it when it finally emerges. Last year there were “pre-n” products, which used some parts of the emerging standard; this year there are “draft-n” products, based on a draft of the proposed “n” standard. Stay tuned for the real thing.

But the most important Wi-Fi term of the moment is “MIMO,” short for multiple-input multiple-output. This is a technique that can greatly improve range and speed by capturing formerly stray parts of a wireless signal and merging them. It is expected to be a key component of the “n” standard, but is already in some “g” products, as well as in the “pre-n” and “draft-n” products.

Broadband
There are two main types of high-speed Internet service: DSL (digital subscriber line) is sold by phone companies, while cable modem service is sold by cable companies. Most people know these terms.

But now there’s a third type, called “fiber optic,” being sold in some parts of the country. This technology uses glass fibers, lit up by a laser and connected directly to your home. (Some other systems use fiber under the street, but not running right up to the house.) The best-known brand of fiber-to-the-home broadband service is Verizon’s “FiOS,” which can deliver TV channels as well as the Internet.

All broadband service providers boast about their speed, and they tend to do so in techie jargon. Slower broadband is measured in kilobits per second, abbreviated as “kbps.” Faster speeds are clocked as megabits per second, or “mbps.” (Note that these terms end in bit, not byte. The latter ending is normally used as a measure of storage capacity, not speed.) One megabit equals 1,000 kilobits. So a DSL line that tops out at 768 kilobits per second, for example, isn’t nearly as fast as one that registers three megabits per second.

Music
Almost everybody knows that MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3) is the most common format for digital music files. But what is AAC? And how about WMA?

All of the above are compressed formats, meaning they take a song that would occupy lots of space on a disk and squeeze it down to a fraction of its original size while trying to preserve the sound. AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) is an industry-standard music-compression format favored by Apple, while WMA (Windows Media Audio) is a proprietary music-compression format that is owned and used by Microsoft. Which of the three you prefer depends on your taste.

Both AAC and WMA are available in two versions. One is an “open” version, which gets created when consumers convert their CDs into these digital formats, and imposes no restrictions on usage. The second is an encrypted, or copy-protected, version, which includes code that restricts how often and under what circumstances the song can be played or copied. Songs sold at Apple’s iTunes Music Store are in the encrypted version of AAC, while songs sold by music services that use Microsoft software are sold in the encrypted version of WMA, meaning there are limits to what you can do with these files.

Back in 2001, the iPod was the first widely sold product to use one of these little hard disks. With a diameter of just under 2 inches, it’s smaller than the hard drives used in most laptops, yet it can hold up to 60 gigabytes of data, or around 15,000 songs. The midsize iPod Mini uses an even smaller version, albeit with decreased capacity. It’s just an inch in diameter but holds up to 6 gigabytes of data, enough for around 1,500 songs. (The lowend iPod Shuffle doesn’t use a hard disk, and it holds relatively few songs in its memory chips.)

But now these little hard disks are migrating to other devices — including cellphones and personal digital assistants — made by other companies, giving these gadgets some of the iPod’s magical combination of diminutive size and expansive capacity. And since these devices can play music, along with the various other functions they perform, they could soon become a challenge to the iPod.

For example, two big cell phone makers, Samsung and Nokia, have designed music-playing phones with small internal hard disks that hold a few gigabytes of data. Samsung’s hard-disk model is sold so far only in Korea, but could make it to the U.S. by the end of this year. Nokia’s will be rolled out late this year, probably first in Europe.

By late 2006, I expect Americans to have numerous choices in hard-disk cell phones.

The first PDA with a hard disk to be offered in the U.S. came out in May. It’s the $499 PalmOne Life-Drive. PalmOne sells the LifeDrive — with its large color screen and 4GB hard disk — as a portable way to store and view or play back music, videos, photos and office documents. It also features the usual Palm calendar, contact and notes functions, and with its Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless networking, it can surf the Web and send and receive e-mail.

The LifeDrive is bulky — much larger and heavier than an iPod Mini with the same size hard disk. And it isn’t a great music player — it has touch-screen play, pause, fast forward and reverse rather than proper buttons, and it doesn’t come with headphones. But it could be the start of a trend for PDAs, since it should be possible to wedge a similar hard disk into a smaller device.

More likely, the bigger threat to the iPod will come from iPod-enabled cell phones. People have to carry their phones anyway, and some already offer music-control buttons and headphones. So if your phone can hold thousands of songs, why carry around a second, separate music player?

Of course, phonemakers still have to prove they can design music-playing phones that are as simple, elegant and cool as iPods. But that could happen.

Little hard disks could also revolutionize digital cameras, allowing photographers to store thousands of shots without lugging around a laptop, although I know of no camera to date that has a hard disk.

Another trend: Small hard disks will likely shrink even more. Already, there’s a company making one with a diameter smaller than an inch. But mini hard drives may also face a challenger of their own — high-capacity memory chips. The chips have tended to be costlier per unit of storage than the disks, but over time they could get competitive. Prices are dropping fast, and chipmakers are working on memory cards, like the one in your digital camera, that are capable of storing over 10 gigabytes.

For now, though, keep your eye on the little hard disk that powers the iPod. It may be powering lots of gadgets soon.