Displays. Screens. They shine at us and brightly shout at us from just about every contraption we touch or see as we travel through our day. The hyperactive super-sized displays on Times Square are an obvious example of our century's obsession with bombarding the senses. We are indeed an audio-visual society with a voracious appetite!

We interact regularly with displays, buttons, and touch-screens without even thinking about it. They are a necessary and integral part of most every electronic device on the market today, from your cell phone to your car, to the cockpit of the plane that whisks you away on vacation. The human wants the machine to do something, and they must communicate. And somehow, they do. "But," you ask, "who knows how to build this stuff?"

Only a relatively small cross-section of our society become the people that are the brains and brawn of the industry that understands the "how" of making such an electronic product, a "device," work. The people that crank out these electronic goodies call their industry the "Embedded Product" industry. A funny name? Well, consider this. Each of these wonderful man-made marvels contains one, or many, microprocessors. You don't see them, and therefore you just don't think about them! For example, you probably do not call your cell phone a computer, but inside that sleek device there is, well..., a computer -- a microprocessor. The microprocessor is therefore 'embedded' inside the device. It is a child of the "Embedded Product" industry.

In fact, every child in grade school today learns that a PC is a "computer" whose brain is a "microprocessor" which runs "software" on an "operating system. The human interacts with it through a "GUI" (pronounced "Gooey") or Graphical User Interface. But do they, or do you, for that matter, question what is going on behind that now-familiar GUI, inside that cute ladybug cell phone? As my three year old son used to say, "How's this thing work?" Does it contain an operating system or a microprocessor or software? "Survey says...YES!"

In fact, a variant of the "find the hidden Mickey" game can be played all day long. I challenge you to take a few moments and make a list of the number of things that you think have a "hidden" microprocessor inside. Are you done? You forgot to write down your microwave oven, didn't you? Sorry, but you also forgot to list your television!

Embedded products, clearly, are everywhere. A fascinating group of engineers and product managers around the world collaborate to design, build and market these high technology products that our society demands, building on the shoulders of those that have come before them. No longer do we find devices with needles, gauges and switches. The intelligence of the microprocessors used in embedded products has eliminated most all of these clunky physical components and have replaced them, instead, with the familiar electronic display. Elegant embedded GUIs, such as one might find on an Apple iPhone or the dashboard of a new Mercedes, warmly reach out to us every day, begging for us to touch them or, at the very least, to just admire them.

So, the very next time that you find yourself flying down the highway in your car, listening to your "tunes," looking at your dashboard graphical interface, with all its virtual meters and needles, answering your cell phone and telling the kids to turn down their DVD, please take a minute to think about the fact that your car alone has many more microprocessors than does the Space Shuttle. I think you'll then agree with me that there is plenty of work yet left for our children to do!