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Microsoft Passed On iPhone-Like Device In 1991

Posted by samzenpus on from the late-to-the-party dept.

theodp writes "Microsoft apparently could have been a contender in the smartphone market, instead of what WP7 is today. Former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold says he tried to convince Microsoft to make an iPhone-like device more than two decades ago. 'The cost will not be very high,' Myhrvold wrote in 1991. 'It is pretty easy to imagine a $400 to $1,000 retail price.' So is Myhrvold bitter that cost-conscious and risk averse Microsoft opted not to pursue his vision? Nope. 'Hey, it was better than predicting the wrong thing,' Myhrvold explains."

47 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Ouch too bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Microsoft has done sooooo bad those last two decades too, they clearly would have been a successful company if they pursued iphones.

    1. Re:Ouch too bad by Myopic · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The underlying premise of this article is that Microsoft, given the opportunity, would have built a device like the iPhone. I think that is preposterous. I think it is obvious that Microsoft would have completely fucked up the implementation, leading to another laughable product.

    2. Re:Ouch too bad by RoboJ1M · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The iPhone was not successful because Apple were first to market.
      Anyway, Microsoft had been doing PDAs with all the same components in long before Apple did and they were all dreadful.

      As much as I loath the Apple culture and all it's frothing zealots, they do do great software and hardware design.
      Something that is totally lacking at Microsoft and somewhat lacking in the Linuxverse.

    3. Re:Ouch too bad by proslack · · Score: 2

      Gene Roddenberry thought of that stuff in 1964.

      --


      Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
  2. MS was probably right by gatkinso · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Idea was before its time. See the Apple Newton.

    --
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    1. Re:MS was probably right by iamhassi · · Score: 2, Informative

      Idea was before its time. See the Apple Newton.

      The story is ridiculous. What network would the phone run on in 1991? 0.1G? There was no wifi, no Bluetooth, no 3G or even 2G. In 1991 the cellphones were giant bag phones that could only display a phone number. No text messaging, no email, no Internet.

      Microsoft had been making touchscreen phones for 5 years before the iPhone came out. Started as PDAs running Windows CE, then windows mobile 5.

      Microsoft had a good run but they just didn't keep up but dont feel bad, Palm was huge in 2005 and now they are gone and Blackberry is almost gone. This shows you anyone can run the cellphone game, you just have to have a good OS and apps people want.

      --
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    2. Re:MS was probably right by flyingsquid · · Score: 5, Insightful

      This is just a desperate, insecure attempt by Myrvold to convince us that he's some kind of technology innovator. But if he had the idea for an iPhone like product back in 1991, before Apple did, then why the hell didn't he build an iPhone once the technology to do so became available? Instead, what Myrvold did do once he got rich as CTO of Microsoft is to create Intellectual Ventures, a company that generates billions of dollars of revenue by buying up patents and then shaking down other companies. In other words, he's a patent troll. He's trying to say, 'oh yeah, I could have done that. I'm innovative'. No you couldn't, and no you're not. All you are is just a patent troll, a parasite on the real innovators, and a total douche for trying to pretend otherwise.

    3. Re:MS was probably right by wvmarle · · Score: 2

      The idea was really very much before it's time, so much I'm almost ready to call bs on it.

      This proposed device from 1991 includes GPS location service. Sure GPS was under construction and worked somewhat, but it was not fully operational until 1994. A bit premature to think it can be put into a handheld consumer device before that.

      It proposes to use a slot for removable media: I don't remember any removable media other than floppy disks from that time. It may have existed in a lab, but not so much out of that.

      Did affordable, reliable touch screens exist already?

      Rechargeable batteries that lasted longer than an hour?

      They call for an online manual - great, when almost no-one even has a mobile phone, and mobile data barely exists, and coverage of mobile networks is patchy to boot. And the Internet as we know it didn't exist - the www had only just been invented.

      Oh well the technology was definitely simply not ready for the device by then. That's one of the reasons it took a while between that chimera and the launch of the iPhone. And why MS rightully rejected putting money into the idea. Obviously so did all the other tech companies (if you seriously talk to MS about a project, then you'd certainly also talk to others as well).

    4. Re:MS was probably right by Dogtanian · · Score: 2

      Idea was before its time. See the Apple Newton.

      Honestly, given the level of detail in the article and the single, brief sketch shown, there's no indication that there was anything for MS to have "passed on" in the first place beyond a very basic concept. Nothing appears to have been implemented.

      This is basic, first-draft future-concept sketch stuff. Reasonably insightful for the time, but not much more.

      There's nothing here that would have been close to an iPhone if implemented with 1991-level technology (or even what they would have expected to have been available in the forseeable future at that point). 1991 was a long time ago. Remember how simple your old millennial call-and-text-and-Snake mobile phone was? It was *already* the better part of a decade after 1991 when those first truly mass-market phones came out, and they're still basic by modern standards. In 1991, GSM had just started, and mobile phones were still large and expensive (to buy and run) yuppie toys and tools for professionals, very crude and very expensive.

      See that "slot for removable media"? Remember that even in the late 90s (several years later), flash media (e.g. those first-generation MP3 players' internal storage, SmartMedia careds, etc.) was typically in the range of 32 - 64 MB, i.e. circa a single MP3 album. Don't know how much could be stored on early-90s media, but the 1989 Atari Portfolio had "expansion cards available in sizes of 32, 64, and 128 KB initially, and later available in capacities up to 4 MB".

      So you could probably have stored 1 song's worth if you forked out for a very expensive 4MB card, but there's no way a portable device would have been able to decode MP3 in real time anyway. (Mid-90s desktop PCs required most of their processing power to do that).

      Others hit the nail on the head when they say that such a device would also require the infrastructure to be in place to be useful. I note that someone else mentions that "CDPD" existed for the (primarily North American) AMPS system back then, but was it ever supported and widespread enough in practice to have been usable? (WP suggests that it never took off) What would the cost have been of using the data necessary for this phone?

      Notice that the title is "Visions for Consumer Computers"- this suggests that it's something they see for the future (i.e. a decade-plus hence, not within the next couple of years), and there's nothing technical or concrete here. As I said above, nothing wrong with that, but let's not inflate it to more than what it was nor make it out to be what it isn't- it's a first-level futuristic brainstorming sketch that in some ways is quite insightful, but it's not detailed, and it's not anything that would have been practical- or at least worthwhile trying to implement- circa 1991. And MS certainly didn't "pass" on the forerunner of the iPhone.... at least, not here.

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    5. Re:MS was probably right by multicoregeneral · · Score: 2

      I was going to mention the Apple Newton, but you beat me to it. I actually owned one. For it's time it was great, even if it didn't do exactly what I wanted it to. It was a business device. More so than the Palm Pilot of the time. It was great, if all you wanted to do was keep up with contacts and write emails, but what I wanted at the time was more of a general purpose computer that I could hold in my hand. The current generation does that, but at the time none of these devices had a consumer focus. Flash back eight years prior, and there's a slim chance in hell they would even try to sell it to consumers. That's where the iPhone was great. Forget the technicals, and what the device actually does for a second. What made the iPhone successful was that it was a color Palm Pilot with the features that your mom would want. It's a subtle difference, but an important one.

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      This signature intentionally left blank.
    6. Re:MS was probably right by man_of_mr_e · · Score: 2

      Dude,

      Myhrvold hasn't worked for MS for 12 years.

      Where do you get that this is MS trying to rewrite history? It's entirely Myhrvold, plumping up his feathers.

      --
      If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
    7. Re:MS was probably right by wvmarle · · Score: 2

      Now look at the sizes of those parts (commercial GPS != available to the general public), and the weights and costs of it, and think how far away that was from shrinking to a hand-holdable size that retails for $400-1000. Your GPS was probably a multiple of that cost alone.

      I'm thinking handheld, you're thinking luggable. Big difference.

    8. Re:MS was probably right by Miamicanes · · Score: 2

      > In 1991 the cellphones were giant bag phones that could only display a phone number.

      If you lived in Iowa, maybe. In places like New York, LA, and Miami, we had the Motorola MicroTAC ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_MicroTAC ).

      > What network would the phone run on in 1991?

      Circuit-switched voice, with 300, 1200, or 2400 baud modem. Slow, but semi-adequate for a BBS, CompuServe, or GEnie.

  3. Penguin clock by Lord+Lode · · Score: 2

    The drawing of the device shows a clock that looks like a penguin in the bottom left. Maybe it ran Linux? :D

  4. Hindsight is 20/20 by acidradio · · Score: 4, Insightful

    OK so the idea may have existed in 1991 but was the technology to make it work "like" an iPhone as we know it there? NO! Without the wireless data (or really data at all!) it is useless. In fact nobody really even knew what the Internet was back in 1991. This is like having an idea for a helicopter but no motor to power it (a la Da Vinci). They may have had CDPD data back then but it was pretty slow. But without the Internet how could you really share with anyone? Was everyone supposed to use, oh, Compuserve?

    Some may argue "yeah, well they could have at least bought the idea and held onto it until it was feasible." That's like if I bought the idea for a warp drive or transporter and held onto it until it becomes feasible. So many other things have to be invented or perfected before anything like that could work. I don't think I'm going to be around long enough for that to happen. And maybe Microsoft felt the same way in 1991 when presented with that iPhone-like idea.

  5. Not that interesting... by nine-times · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It doesn't seem that interesting to me that someone had the idea. Once you have computers and computerized contacts, calendars, media, etc., it's not *that* clever to say, "Oh, it would be cool if we could put all this into a handheld device.". Further, there were lots of working versions of this before the iPhone. You can see precursors in Windows phones, Blackberries, Palm devices, and even Apple' own Newton device.

    The real issue is the implementation. You need the technology to be able to make the thing. You need fast enough processors, long-lasting batteries, nice LCD screens, and small storage devices that can hold a lot of data. In 1991, the technology to make an iPhone didn't exist yet. And then beyond that, once you have all the technology, you need someone to put it all together into a design that people find useful, and that was the only innovation of the iPhone. Apple didn't originate the idea and they weren't the first people to have access to the technology, they were just the most successful in creating a design that people liked.

    1. Re:Not that interesting... by flyingsquid · · Score: 2
      To solve a problem, you need to do three things: (1) come up with a solution, and (2) implement it. But we sometimes forget that there's another step there. This could be step (0), identifying which problem to solve in the first place.

      It's like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Getting the answer is actually fairly trivial, but figuring out the right question to be asking in the first place is really hard.

      Jobs and Apple became very, very good at solving the problems of product design and interface, and actually building the things. But one of the things that really set Jobs apart as a CEO was his remarkable ability to understand which problems to solve. I remember watching the Apple keynote talk where he introduced the iPhone, and thinking, "yeah, whatever. A phone where I touch the screen instead of physical buttons? I like tactile feedback. This is just a gimmick" He'd managed to solve this problem and build the device, and it never occurred to me that it would be something that would appeal to anybody other than the fanatics who need the newest, shiniest, slimmest offering from Apple. Microsoft had been playing with touch technology for years but never thought to put it in a portable device. It took years for RIM to recognize that the iPhone posed a threat to Blackberry. It wasn't obvious to anybody that something like the iPhone was what people wanted- not to consumers, and not to the highly paid CEOs who are paid millions of dollars because, supposedly, they are able to understand this kind of thing. Even after he'd built it and told everyone it would change everything, it wasn't obvious. Jobs knew otherwise, and he understood it enough to make developing the iPhone and iOS Apple's top priority over Mac and OS X.

  6. It was about execution, not about the concept by f97tosc · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Sony-Ericsson actually DID release iPhone-like devices (e.g. P800,P900) before Apple. They did not sell very well, at least not compared to iPhone. They just weren't as slick. And Microsoft isn't exactly known for releasing very slick products either - so even if they had released it it is far from obvious that they had been successful.

    1. Re:It was about execution, not about the concept by Dot.Com.CEO · · Score: 3, Informative

      I strongly disagree. I had a P800 and a P910 later on. They were BY FAR the best phones I've ever owned, considering the expectations of technology at the time. They had working email on a huge screen, an amazing input system (and I'm talking Graffiti here, it was truly amazing and I really miss it), they looked great and the battery lasted for ages. Why Ericsson gave up on UIQ I'll never know, but I'm sure it was the wrong decision. Whatever alternative plan they had, it didn't work out. Going a bit off topic here but, in my opinion, Nokia's Symbian S60 was also a great OS for people wanting connectivity on the go. Thing is, people didn't know they wanted to be connected until iPhones and, to a much lesser extent, Blackberries. I have great love for e-series Nokias of 3-5 years ago, and I'm sad to see them disappear. Build quality, form factor, yes even software, were excellent for what they were supposed to be.

      --
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  7. Yeah, of course. But how about services? by Fri13 · · Score: 2

    What was MS versions for iTunes, iPhoto, iMovies, OS X at that time?

    iPhone success isn't just it has big multi-touch display and just one physical button (- volume and power) what to use.

    It was that Apple had released iTunes, gathered, Music, Movies and others there and allow easy automatic syncing to 4-8GB flash memory what first iPhone had.
    It was full blown browser and email.

    Apple knew that to get successful phone, you need to have services ready for its users. Not way round like Microsoft usually does that product is "ready" but services lacks few years behind.

  8. for once MS was right by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    no one wants a MS phone!

  9. No kidding by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 5, Informative

    In 1991 2G aka digital cell technology had just launched. So most cell service was still AMPS and anyone who tried data over that knew it was a painful, painful, experience, not to shit battery life of analogue phones. Plus computers were still very slow. The 486 was the king of the heap and man, even that was slow. It took forever to do normal tasks. I remember having my computer print something and wandering off to the kitchen to get a snack while I waited for it to deal with all the work of rasterizing and sending the document to the printer. Of course since mobile technology will always be less powerful you'd be luck to have 286 class hardware at that time. Finally the Internet, which is what makes people really like smartphones, was something that only people at research and government institutions knew about, it was not a big public thing.

    For smart phones to work we needed three things to happen:

    1) Data networks to get fast enough to make surfing reasonable. This pretty much means 3G. It was doable on 2G networks, I suppose, but pretty bad. It needed to be fast enough that a person's attention span wasn't exceeded by the load time.

    2) Computers to get fast enough that even a slow computer is reasonable. Since a mobile computer will be many times less powerful than a full sized one, that means full sized ones first had to outgrow the era of always being slow. Wasn't until pretty recently that happened. We just needed chips to get shrunk enough that a reasonable amount of power could go in a tiny package.

    3) Something to do with them, a network to get on. BBSes weren't going to cut it. We needed the Internet, and more we needed it to actually be useful.

    None of that really happened until early 2000s. A smartphone before then would have been a flop because nobody other than a few geeks would have found it anything other than an unwieldy, expensive, useless gadget.

    Technology has to progress to certain points before ideas are feasible. A good example of where it hasn't would be flying cars. Idea has been around forever, prototypes have been built, nothing has happened. Why? Because the technology isn't there. It isn't an idea problem, it is a tech problem. We'd need some major new propulsion/levitation tech before that sort of thing would be feasible.

    Really, smartphones happened when they were ready, and the iPhone is not notable for that in any way. It was simply the device that made it cool for regular people. Blackberries had been popular with professionals and the government (especially the US government, they love them some Blackberries) for a few years.

    Hell for that matter MS had smartphones, they just weren't very good.

    1. Re:No kidding by grumling · · Score: 2

      And most online data was text. You can send pages of text in a few seconds, even over a 9600 Baud link. 128Kbps was considered very fast back then. Heck, even today mostly text based transfers like Twitter updates or WAP web pages are fairly quick on 2G.

      Even AOL cached icons and other graphics on the user's PC. Every few weeks they'd send down an update that had any new graphics.

      --
      "Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
    2. Re:No kidding by dbIII · · Score: 2

      4) The Japanese had to have it for over a decade and find the pitfalls before a company in Europe would take it up, and then three to five years after that Apple gave it a try.
      That's not as damning as it sounds. Millions of train and bus commuters in Japan provided a market for emerging smartphones that would have trouble selling in large numbers in the USA.

    3. Re:No kidding by petsounds · · Score: 3, Informative

      Yeah, that was mostly because NeXTSTEP used Display Postscript as its display rendering engine. So it didn't have to do much translation work to send a Postscript of your file to the printer. A 68030-based Macintosh was certainly not as fast.

  10. Re:Not quite an iPhone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Way ahead of its time? This thing is a PDA, like the Psion, the Newton (1992), and the Palm (1997). Everybody was thinking about these things at the time. Only Palm managed to make it successful.

    To get an iPhone, you need, you know, a Phone function - which this "vision" didn't have. And mobile internet - ditto (it did have email, tho). And music. And apps. And. And.

    "predicted the emergence of the iPhone down to the smallest detail, describing a 'digital wallet'..."? Guess what the iPhone is not? A digital wallet!

    What a joke...

  11. You forgot two important things: by aussersterne · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You need a critical mass of the public on a global network, and you need a suitable UI. The latter is really Apple's innovation with the iPhone/iTouch/iPad. By the mid-to-late '90 we had wireless devices with touchscreens that fit into pockets, but they were all heavily textual (even though they had icons and graphics) in the way that they operated and they were also all reliant on a desktop metaphor of some kind. Apple's Newton, if you look at the UI, was the closest thing we had to a truly mobile UI, and while it was way ahead of its time and even has some things I'd kill to have back on an iPhone today, it was also still all about office metaphors: sheets of paper, sliding drawers, envelopes and trash cans, and so on.

    Even those that want to make fun of Newton basically have to admit that in terms of practical usability when walking (i.e. in motion, outdoors) down the street, there's a world of difference in usability between a connected Palm or Windows PocketPC device from the pre-iPhone era and an iDevice. That's Apple's big contribution, what Microsoft did absolutely incorrectly. After all, the basically *had* an iPhone (so did Palm) by the early '00s. There's no technical reason that Windows phones couldn't have been made similar to iDevices in their usability, especially with high end models having faster processors and more memory capability; it's just about UI/UX design. Apple does it. Microsoft did it once a long time ago (partially) and has ignored it since, until Metro—which is much less about some radical improvement in Microsoft-running device hardware as it is about the first real UI/UX design Microsoft has attempted in years, directly in response to iPhone.

    --
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  12. Not an 'iPhone'. by Junta · · Score: 4, Informative

    Basically, it was a smartphone. It might've been the first if they pursued it, but then again, the Simon being first didn't buy it much in the long run:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon

    Having a smartphone on the market in the early 90s didn't really matter. Internet in early 90s didn't matter one bit to the mass market. The first browser wouldn't even exist for two more years. Until the relatively late 90s, most people didn't even bother with the internet. Without a large market demanding internet (and appropriate cellular resources to actually service that demand), there is no possibility of an 'iPhone'. This is no more an 'iPhone' than numerous smartphones that cropped up before the iPhone (and enjoyed moderate success too). What the iPhone specifically brought in its initial successful incarnation were two things. One, a web browser/interface that could reasonably render and navigate 'desktop' websites instead of being limited to crippled mobile sites that few sites bothered with at all or put something useless up. Two, the marketing momentum of their brand value from the iPod success.

    --
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  13. Patent troll alert by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Nathan Myhrvold is the most prominent of all patent trolls.

    Drawings like this where pretty common all through the 80s.

  14. Full screen apps by hey · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Notice that the apps are not full screen. Too desktop-ish.

  15. We have flying cars. by Fred+Ferrigno · · Score: 2

    They're just called helicopters. Helicopters do everything flying cars were supposed to do, they're just too expensive for the average person. Regardless of any new technology, the extra energy needed to overcome the force of gravity means that such craft will still be expensive relative to cars or trains.

    1. Re:We have flying cars. by TheLink · · Score: 2

      Actually even if you use helis that are more stable (coaxial + gyros+ fly by wire etc) they'd be too difficult for the average person to fly _safely_.

      Go look at the driving skills of the average driver. Many can't stay on their own lane or park properly!

      So who in their right mind expects hundreds of them to fly together safely through cities with skyscrapers, and land successfully? You'd need technology that makes flying cars about as safe as lifts. Otherwise your city will soon be like a war zone.

      You need AIs in charge of the car. Basically the redundant AIs would be like a non-suicidal horse that the driver controls. Try to ride a horse into a wall and the you'd find the horse rather unwilling to do so.

      --
    2. Re:We have flying cars. by Grishnakh · · Score: 3, Informative

      My wife's a helicopter pilot, so I know a little about this. Just handling the machine is hard enough. While the coaxial+fly-by-wire stuff is obviously much easier to fly, I've never seen that actually put into operation for human-size craft, only R/C toys. All the ones that humans fly are not fly-by-wire, to my knowledge; they require someone on the controls at all times to keep them from crashing; the pilot has to make constant corrections every time there's a gust of wind or thermal updraft or whatever.

      However, this is only one small part of the difficulty of being a pilot. The other is navigation. Navigating an aircraft (helicopter or fixed-wing) is not easy, especially if you can't see (which is why there's VFR and IFR flying: VFR for when you can see, IFR for when you can't and have to fly by instrument). You have to plot out a course beforehand, taking into account airspace, navigation hazards, etc. You have to make sure you're flying higher than the terrain (not a problem with commercial jets usually, but it is with smaller craft that fly much lower), and you have to make sure you're where you're supposed to be. You can't just fly through Class B airspace (over any major city) without following the correct rules and procedures and being at the right altitude, following tower instructions, etc. For IFR flying, you have to follow established routes. It's all quite complicated, and takes pilots a while to learn. It takes a reasonably-intelligent person at least a year or two to learn all this stuff (maybe less, depends on how much time they can dedicate to it); there's no way an average moron on the street could figure this stuff out and pass an FAA exam. Even after all this, licensed pilots (esp. the private ones) screw up all the time.

      Sure, if you made an aircraft fairly easy-to-fly with some heavy computer assistance (the way $100M military planes have computer assistance to make them stable in flight, like the B2), and took away ALL air traffic, an average moron might be able to pilot a plane around decently. But add in all the rules, and all the extra traffic, they'd be crashing into each other constantly. It's already fairly crowded up there, and that's with just commercial traffic and a very small number of private pilots (relative to population); imagine adding millions of regular people; it'd be a mess.

    3. Re:We have flying cars. by Grishnakh · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Absolutely wrong.

      For one thing, go to any helicopter school and ask if everyone finishes. They don't. There's lots of people who wash out, because they simply can't handle it. Either they're too slow, and they run out of money trying to learn because they burn too many hours flying around in circles trying to learn to handle the machine, or they simply give up. Some manage to get a private license (by the skin of their teeth), but aren't able to go any further because they just can't develop the flying skill: the skill you need for the commercial license (and then the CFI license after that) are even greater than what's passable for the private license.

      Some people are simply better at hands-on things than other people. Only a moron would deny this simple fact. Some people just can't develop the feel for flying. And yes, there are people who are naturally good at flying helicopters, just like there's people who are naturally good at playing piano, or riding a bicycle, or writing software, or learning multivariable calculus, or being social and charismatic. All of these skills are learned, but some people pick them up much faster than others, while others never can pick them up to a passable level.

    4. Re:We have flying cars. by Grishnakh · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Again, you don't know what you're talking about. You've never flown one yourself, you've never been to a school, you've never known anyone who did. Maybe instead of making up shit, you should listen to people who have more experience than you do. The fact is, a lot of people don't make it. They don't develop the skills.

      Lots of people don't become good artists either. They don't have the manual dexterity. Are you going to try to convince me that everyone can become a Michaelangelo? Bullshit.

      And who has 20 years to develop the skills that someone else can pick up in 3 months?

      There's even people who aren't able to get a driver's license (as easy as that is in the USA) because they can't develop the skills. They're just too stupid. Or in other countries, where the tests are much more stringent (e.g. Germany, where you have to pay $5k to hire an instructor to learn to drive), lots and lots of people don't make it.

    5. Re:We have flying cars. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Allow me to disagree.

      I am one of those people who are naturally good at things involving coordination and timing, but I've known many people (maybe half?) who JUST ARENT.

      I've had friends invite me to come participate in their *insert physical activity*. One was sword fighting, for example. He'd been practising for a year or so, weekly and could not improve his rank in their tournaments no matter how much more he trained and I beat him in the first few hours.

      I'ts not a "woohoo I'm awesome" post, because I got my ass handed to me by many other people there. But those were people who had natural talent AND training.

      The point is that half of people will hit a ceiling that is barely above the entry-level for someone who is naturally talented at the activity. It is said that 80% of fighter pilots washed out of the U-2 spyplane training program. Even 80% of fighter pilots who have spend 10,000 hours training couldn't fly the U2 because at operational altitude, even at maximum speed it flies on a knife edge of a stall and requires a DAMN skilled pilot to keep it in the air.

      It might be a crutch for someone to say "I won't try because I'm not talented", but there is also a lot of truth in pointing out that some people, after 1000 hours of training will be barely better (if any) than others after 10 hours. That's just how it works.

    6. Re:We have flying cars. by mcrbids · · Score: 2

      As one of those very small numbers of private pilots out there, this has occurred to me many times. Flying a plane is not like driving a car. They aren't even slightly related.

      If you have a problem in a car, you slow down or stop. Anybody can do this. But if you have a problem in your plane, and you slow down or stop, you stall and immediately go into free-fall. Generally, you can recover from a stall quite easily, but if done near the ground, you die.

      I'm convinced we'd have to get rid of the verbal radio system now in use for ATC in order to scale flying up much at all. Fly over any really busy airspace like LAX and you have frequencies so jammed with traffic that it's 100% talking, no meaningful silence at all. How could you even imagine 10x the traffic, let alone the 100x or so it would take to make flying a commodity?

      In my humble opinion, the only way to make private flying a commodity is through extensive use of computer technology. Some type of swarm-based algorithm over radio based on proximity. With a combination of self-announce technology coupled with radar-backed verification, such a system could be highly reliable.

      --
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  16. Microsoft blew it. by Karmashock · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Windows mobile was really pretty great for when it came out. It had decent integration with office, a more extensive library of programs then any competing system, and a similar structure to windows in many respects. It even had a registry.

    But MS blew it. They didn't take the platform seriously and they left it to rot on the vine.

    That said, lets not forget that what is really making apple so strong here is itunes. And that isn't MS's mistake so much as it is the content providers. Apple is eating the publishing industry and nibbling on MS, motorola, and a few other companies. But indifferent to apple's successes, MS screwed up on windows mobile.

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  17. Way before 1991 by fiziko · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Look at the tablet and portable phone technology from any incarnation of Star Trek or other popular sci-fi. The concept has been around for decades. The technological infrastructure to support a device that appeals to the general public didn't exist until very recently. Look at the wireless data speeds and network demands of today's smart phones: there's no practical way to have gotten them on the market sooner.

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    - W. Blaine Dowler
    http://www.bureau42.com
  18. Handheld PC-clones of the 90's by shoppa · · Score: 2

    In fact there were many companies making battery powered, wireless connected, handheld PC-clones in the 90's.

    Where I saw them, they most commonly were used on local wireless networks in industrial/warehouse/trucking settings but I also know they were being used in some retail and manufacturing settings. The wireless local area networks back in the early 90's were in reality not much more than radio channels with analog modems.

    They had small text displays and ran MS-DOS applications that were hardcoded to the proprietary wireless network. Certainly nothing like a real network stack.

    Part of the difficulty is that AFAIK they were never usable as phones and barely usable as data network devices in the wide-area sense. The "data network" concept with cellphone networks in the early 90's was exquisitely awkward in the US, with the most common access method being to have an analog modem hooked up to the cellphone network (which was all analog in the early 90's and just beginning to move to digital in the late 90's) and you called your ISP's phone number. That was really super sucky.

    Certainly Windows CE had some concepts that were more high-minded than the custom-built MS-DOS applications, but in most ways it was even more sucky to the end user (who just wanted to run the same application over and over again, scanning barcodes, taking inventory, etc.) I think it's not even ironic that even Apple is having a hard time making inroads into these single-purpose applications with their multi-purpose iPhone/iPad platforms; the specialized platforms being used in this area for the past 20 years are not sold on computing buzzwords or brand cachet but on pure utility.

  19. Hmmm... by drobety · · Score: 2

    It looks rectangular with round corners, and a flat black screen...

  20. 1991: HP95 Palmtop PC by neurocutie · · Score: 2

    In 1991, HP introduced the HP95 palmtop PC, a small pocketable computer running DOS. Within a few years they would also release the HP100 and HP200lx. These units were quite popular and did much of what smartphones do today, except of course the phone part. They could do email, spreadsheets, WP, etc, and wince they ran DOS, could do just about anything available, include running Windows 2/3, Word, even web browsers, Usenet clients, Telnet, FTP, etc. They were an important forerunner to the PDAs, Psions (Symbian), Palms, etc which in turn gave rise to the first real smartphones. They also themselves mutated from DOS palmtops to run MS WinCE, which were the forerunners of Windows Mobile PDAs and smartphones.

  21. MS more interested in crushing GO Inc by Locutus · · Score: 2

    Read the book "Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure" by Jerry Kaplan and tell me that Microsoft had any real interest in developing hand held devices and was not in the game to crush the those creating the market? Pen for Windows or whatever they called it was mocked up and presold and marketed to destroy GO Inc. After they succeeded there it floundered. Just as Windows CE was created to keep Palm from growing into a desktop threat and then floundered, like how MS IE was created to destroy Netscape Navigator and then floundered.

    So it is no surprise they would not attempt to create anything like Myhrvold might have envisioned because it wasn't needed to crush GO Inc. They were not concerned with Apple and its Newton(another GO Inc product spin-off) when it came about shortly after the GO Inc and Microsoft partnership.

    I also don't believe Microsoft would have been willing to create the required OS platform for such a device to be successful. Again, read the book as it explains how even back then, it was all about Windows and pushing EVERYTHING and EVERYONE to that OS/env platform.

    LoB

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    "Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
  22. Bullsh*t by multi+io · · Score: 2

    Wait, so Myhrvold conceived an "iPhone-like device" by imagining some kind of gadget that had a clock, contacts, calendar and email? By that standard, Palm Inc. not only conceived, but actually designed and built an "iPhone-like device", called it "Palm Pilot" and sold it by the millions. Hooray.

  23. And no one would have wanted an iPhone in by nedlohs · · Score: 2

    1991. Well OK not "no one" but certainly not a large market. At that time there was no mp3, there was no WWW, heck most people didn't have email.

    And of course the device shown in the drawing is almost the opposite of an iphone. Overlapping windows. No touch. It's not an iphone it's a PDA - which already existed at that time. The Psion Series 3 was being sold in 1991 - not just having vague drawings of a rectangular box being drawn. Apple was already working on the Newton.

  24. Re:Because They Already Made One? by Grishnakh · · Score: 2

    Obviously, most people disagree with you, because touchscreen (non-stylus) devices are all the rage now, and stylus-based devices have been pushed for 10+ years now and never did very well. No one wants to mess with a stupid stylus just to make a phone call or use an app. Worse, what if the stupid stylus gets lost? Now your device is useless until you can find another one, or you have to carry around some other stick-like item in your pocket just to use your phone. Jobs obviously called this one correctly.

    Furthermore, who draws pictures on their phone? No one cares about that.

  25. not actually a phone by pbjones · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Did I miss something? it doesn't mention phone as a feature in the diagram, so it's just a PDA or handheld Computer, an idea that wasn't really unique at the time.

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