Computers -- their brief history notwithstanding -- are no different. Now Intel and Microsoft are contemplating the next evolutionary leap. And like most changes, it entails a tradeoff.

The bad news: In 12 to 18 months, you may find that many new models won't work with your current printer, PalmPilot or other peripherals. The good news: If industry plans pan out, these new PCs just might be more stable and reliable, and far simpler to use, than any machine available today. What's going on with computer design? Well, we're about to see the advent of something called the "legacy-free PC," a desperate attempt by the Wintel cartel of Microsoft and Intel to head off the surge of simple, reliable information appliances -- things like television set-top boxes for surfing the Web -- which threatens to replace PCs.

After decades of insisting that the complex,fragile, irritating Wintel PC design is really simple and reliable, Microsoft and Intel are finally owning up to the fact that it needs a drastic overhaul to actually become the comprehensible, stable machine pictured in industry propaganda. At least they're admitting as much in private industry councils and technical meetings.

But this change of heart hasn't crept into the industry's public rhetoric or marketing, where the fantasy of computer simplicity still rules. The two giants who control PC design have launched a quiet initiative called "Easy PC," which aims to radically transform the general-purpose personal computer while preserving its name and basic business model. And the core of this plan is an effort to persuade the PC makers, who have been reluctant in the past to make big changes, to drop many older, or "legacy," features from the basic design of the machines.

These legacy features are deemed to be the cause of much of the instability users hate. Of course, skepticism is in order here.These companies know as much about making things easy as Hollywood knows about making things wholesome. And Microsoft and Intel have made similar promises and proposals before, only to fail to deliver. They blame the PC makers for those failures, and the PC makers blame them. But nothing has happened.

This time, however, there are several external forces and trends that make the prospects better. The first is the coming wave of digital appliances, special-purpose devices in the mold of the Palm Pilot or WebTV, that do a few things well, cost very little and can hook up to the Internet. Next is the appeal of the iMac, which shows that consumers will flock to a technically simpler but stylish hardware design.

Finally, there's the plummeting price consumers are willing to pay for a home computer, which argues for eliminating some of the hardware inside and making it more robust to whittle down after-purchase technical- support costs. Slated to die under this plan are the two ancient, slow, balky connectorsfound on the back of every Wintel PC: the parallel, or printer, port and the serial port. Also due for extinction are some of the internal slots that hold sound cards, modems and the adapters that make some peripherals function.

These are the slots designated "ISA." The ISA slots have already been overtaken by their successors, called PCI slots, but many PC owners still rely on the old ISA cards, whether they know it or not. And these are just the first candidates for elimination. Eventually under the plan, nearly every familiar connector in today's PCs would be dropped, even the keyboard and mouse connectors.

All of these hardware ports would be replaced by just two newer ports, called USB and FireWire. USB, or Universal Serial Bus, is already included on every new PC, and a slew of printers, scanners, disk drives and other USB-connected devices have finally appeared. FireWire, also known as "1394" or "i.Link," is just starting to show up. So far, it is aimed mainly at the task of transferringhigh-volume digital video streams between computers and digital video cameras, but it can do much more. The two connectors are based on different technologies, but they have many similarities. Both use thin, lightweight cables with small plugs on the end.

Each is much faster than the parallel and serial ports, though FireWire is far speedier than USB. And neither requires the assignment of designations or addresses such as the infamous "com port" or "IRQ" settings that foul up PCs today. Not only that, both USB and FireWire can handle multiple devices plugged into a shared port, either by creating a daisy chain of linked devices or by adding a small hub that turns one connector into several. And best of all, these ports are smart enough to configure themselves automatically for a wide variety of devices, with minimal user intervention.

As in the past, Apple Computer is already ahead of the Wintel pack. The hot-selling iMac has none of the traditional Macintosh ports and connectors - it's solely a USBmachine. Its big brother, the Power Macintosh G3 tower, is based on USB and FireWire. And the iMac has been an important inspiration for both Intel and Microsoft. Of course, there's a big downside to these changes: If you buy one of the new legacy-free PCs, your peripherals, including your printer, could become useless. The industry assumes that adapters will become available, as they have been in the case of the iMac, to hook older devices to the new ports.

But replacing those obsolete internal slots may be harder. The industry also plans some other changes. One goal is to finally produce PCs that will turn on and off quickly and crisply without any bootup and shutdown procedures.

And the companies hope that with fewer ports and a simpler, smaller internal design, they can offer jazzy-looking models like the iMac. That's all fine. But hardware changes aren't enough. Other aspects of the personal computer, especially Microsoft's Windows operating system, will have to be radically simplified andstabilized before a PC can really be considered "easy." Microsoft is talking about doing just that. In its recent reorganization, the company set up an entirely separate group devoted to creating something called "Consumer Windows," which will (supposedly) be cleaner and better.

Only time will tell. The face of Windows, the user interface, needs drastic simplification. But if that's all this new group does, the project will fail. The software's underlying architecture must also be cleaned up and freed of some of the legacy code that allows it to run older software, such as programs written for DOS and Windows 3.1. If Windows ran only modern software written specifically for Windows 95 and Windows 98, it would crash far less often. "The computer today ... is error prone," said one expert in a recent speech calling for a major overhaul. "It's difficult and complex to use. And the [designs] tend to be somewhat unexciting from a consumer perspective.

But you've got to turn these things on, and they have tojust work, and they've got to work all the time. And they have to work no matter what software you use. ...We're going to have to design for simplicity and appeal." The expert who made those remarks? Microsoft's president, Steve Ballmer, in an address to a hardware engineers conference. If Ballmer puts his considerable clout and money where his mouth is, things could get interesting.

(www.ptech.wsj.com)